The treatise makes this point exceedingly clear by two quotations which bear repeating.
"The author of the Arimaspeia thinks these lines terrible:
"Here too, is mighty marvel for our thought:
'Mid seas men dwell, on water, far from land:
Wretches they are, for sorry toil is theirs;
Eyes on the stars, heart on the deep they fix;
Oft to the gods, I ween, their hands are raised;
Their inward parts in evil case upheaved.
"Anyone, I think, will see that there is more embroidery than terror in it all. Now for Homer:
"As when a wave by the wild wind's blore
Down from the clouds upon a ship doth light,
And the whole hulk with scattering foam is white,
And through the sails all tattered and forlorn
Roars the fell blast: the seamen with affright
Shake, and from death a hand-breadth they are borne."[[34]]
The first quoted passage is indeed not only "embroidery," but mere talk about shipwrecks, and the terrors of the deep. Homer realizes the situation by sensory images; he makes the reader see the white foam, and hear the wind howl through the torn sails, yes, and shake with the frightened sailors.
3. Plutarch
But judgments like those of the appreciative and discerning author of the treatise On the Sublime are rare. Plutarch in his essay On the Reading of Poets, is much more representative of late Greek criticism. This essay is not a treatise on the theory of poetry, but a thoughtful discussion of the place of poetry in the education of young men. Consequently the greater part of the essay is devoted to the moral purpose of poetry, and as such will be treated in the second section of this study. Two points, however, are of importance to treat here: his theory of poetical imitation, and his comparison of poetry with painting.
The "imitation" of Plutarch was far narrower than that of Aristotle. To Plutarch, imitation meant a naturalistic copy of things as they are. "While poetry is based on imitations ... it does not resign the likeness of the truth, since the charm of imitation is probability."[[35]] As a result of his naturalism, Plutarch admitted as appropriate poetical material immorality and obscenity as well as virtue, because these things are in life. If the copy is good, the poem is artistic and praiseworthy, just as a painting of a venomous spider, if a faithful representation of its loathsome subject, is praised for its art.
Perhaps it was Plutarch's naturalistic theory of imitation in poetry which led him to compare poetry with painting. This he does in what he says was a common phrase that "poetry is vocal painting, and painting, silent poetry."[[36]] The false analogy, "ut pictura poesis," establishing, as it does, a sanction in criticism for the static in drama, flourished until Lessing exposed it in his Laocoon. Aristotle at the beginning had made clear that the essential element in drama is movement, a movement which could have a beginning, a middle, and an end.