Æneid
. The Contents of both which Books come before those of the first Book in the Thread of the Story, tho' for preserving of this Unity of Action they follow them in the Disposition of the Poem.
Milton
, in imitation of these two great Poets, opens his
Paradise Lost
with an Infernal Council plotting the Fall of Man, which is the Action he proposed to celebrate; and as for those great Actions, which preceded, in point of Time, the Battle of the Angels, and the Creation of the World, (which would have entirely destroyed the Unity of his principal Action, had he related them in the same Order that they happened) he cast them into the fifth, sixth, and seventh Books, by way of Episode to this noble Poem.
Aristotle
allows, that
Homer