Agios Athanasios site, Ithaki

and how zeus was fed like a nestling by the doves and how odysseus passed ten nights on the shipwreck without food and the improbable incidents in the slaying of the suitors when homer nods like this we must be content to say that he dreams as zeus might dream Another reason for these remarks on the Odyssey is that I wish to make you understand that great poets and prose writers, after they have lost their power of depicting the passions, turn naturally to the delineation of character.

Such, for instance, is the lifelike and characteristic picture of the Palace of Odysseus, which may be called a sort of comedy of manners.

CHAPTER X let us now consider whether there is anything further which conduces to the sublime in writing it is a law of nature that in all things there are certain constituent parts co-existent with their substance it necessarily follows therefore that one cause of sublimity is the choice of the most striking circumstances involved in whatever we are describing and further the power of afterwards combining them into one animate whole The reader is attracted partly by the selection of the incidents, partly by the skill which has welded them together.

For instance, Sappho, in dealing with the passionate manifestations attending on the frenzy of lovers, always chooses her strokes from the signs which she has observed to be actually exhibited in such cases.