In prose he had (or at least so it would seem likely) a lesser bulk of material, and what he had was subject to a curious condition, of which more hereafter. But he had nearly all the best things that we have—Plato and Xenophon, Herodotus and Thucydides, all the greatest of the orators. Here, however, his date again subjected him to disadvantages, the greatest of which—one felt in every page of the _Poetics_, and not insensible in the _Rhetoric_—was the absence, entire or all but entire, of any body of prose fiction. The existence, the date, the subjects, the very verse or prose character of the “Milesian tales,” so often talked of, are all shadows of shades, and whatever they were, Aristotle takes no count of them. It seems to be with him a matter of course that “fiction” and “poetry” are coextensive and synonymous.[37] Of the enormous and, to speak frankly at once, the very disastrous, influence which this limitation of his subject-matter has on him, it will be time to speak fully later. Let us first see what this famous little treatise[38]—than which perhaps no other document in the world, not religious or political, has been the occasion of fuller discussion—does actually contain. Footnote 37: He does, no doubt, refer to the prose mimes, _v. infra_, and in referring at the same time to the “Socratic dialogues” he may be specially thinking of the “Egyptian and other” stories with which Socrates was wont, half to please, half to puzzle, his hearers. But his whole treatment of Tragedy and Epic is really based on some such assumption as that in the text. Footnote 38: I need hardly express, but could not possibly omit the expression of, my indebtedness to my friend and colleague Professor Butcher’s admirable edition and translation of the work in _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_ (London, 2nd ed., 1898), a book which, as much as any other for many years past, enables English scholarship to hold its head up with that of other countries. Nor need I make any apologies for occasionally differing, on the purely critical side, with him as to the interpretation of a document which is admittedly very obscure in parts, and on even the clearest parts of which opinion, not demonstration, must decide in very many cases.