{hoi d' hôs t' aigypioi gampsônyches ankylocheilai petrê eph' hypsêlê megala klazonte machôntai,} or ὁσσον δ' ηεροειδες ανηρ ιδεν οφθαλμοισιν ἡμενος εν σκοπιη, λευσσων επι οινοπα ποντον, τοσσον επιθρωσκουσι θεων ὑψηχεες ἱπποι.[111] {hosson d' êeroeides anêr iden ophthalmoisin hêmenos en skopiê, leussôn epi oinopa ponton, tosson epithrôskousi theôn hypsêchees hippoi.} [111] _Iliad_, xvi. 428 f.: 'As vultures with crooked talons and curved beaks that upon some high crag fight, screaming loudly.' _Ibid._ v. 770 f.: 'As far as a man's view ranges in the haze, as he sits on a point of outlook and gazes over the wine-dark sea, so far at a spring leap the loud-neighing horses of the gods.' It is hard, as the beginnings of Roman poetry show, to devise a metre which is not rough, unmusical, or even grotesque: yet for richness and strength this first metre of Europe has never been rivalled by the Greeks or by any one else. The same natural technical skill appears in more subtle things even than metre or language. Homer is born knowing by some instinct the profound secret of literary art which Aristotle formulated centuries later as the principle of unity of Action. The plot of a play, he writes in the _Poetics_, 'should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.... It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be.... Such is the practice, we may say, of most poets. Here again the transcendant excellence of Homer appears. He never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily embraced in a single view: while if he had kept it in moderate limits it would have been over-complicated by the variety of incidents. As it is, he detaches a single portion.'[112] Once stated, the principle of unity of action becomes a commonplace of literary art. But, as the _Annals_ of Ennius or the _Faerie Queen_ show, it is not obvious until stated, and the poets from whose practice Aristotle made his induction, must have had a rare technical instinct unconsciously to preserve unity of interest through the complications of a long epic or drama. Such achievements were only possible to a people with a natural genius for literary art. In the hands of the Greeks the various elements of literature found their τελος {telos} and achieved their natural form, almost with the same instinctive evolution by which a seed unfolds to its predestined shape. [112] _Poetics_, c. 23 (tr. Butcher).