How Poetics drew on The Iliad
A documented line of influence: Aristotle demonstrably engaged Homer’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Iliad
Homer · c. 750 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Poetics
Aristotle · c. 335 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
9/10
On Poetics’s page
- The Poetics is built on Homer — Aristotle holds up the Iliad as his chief model of how an epic should be made
- His prized 'unity of action' is just a description of what the Iliad does: one event, the wrath of Achilles, gives the sprawling war a single spine
- Read the poem first and Aristotle's rules stop sounding abstract — you've already felt the thing he's theorizing
On The Iliad’s page
- Aristotle made the Iliad the central exhibit of his theory of epic
- He singled out one thing — Homer organizes the whole poem around a single connected action, the anger of Achilles, instead of cramming in the entire war
- That focus became the template every later epic was measured against; in the Poetics the Iliad isn't an example, it's the standard