What does it mean to think of the literary work as a topography, or even as a landscape? How is literature a form that can be “surveyed” like a piece of land, according to both meanings of the verb? These questions pave the way toward an analysis of a recurring problem that threads through this book, that is, the attempt to see a place as a whole, from a perfectly positioned vantage point. In this chapter, I examine the correspondence between plot and place that occurs in the Iliad. I begin with an investigation of how and why Homer's work was identified by Aristotle as having the quality of being “easily viewable,” and then move on to consider those images and places in the Iliad that suggest the idea of synoptic or protocartographic space. It should be stated at the outset that Homer's account of the Trojan War in the Iliad presents a conception of space that is quite different to the space of the Odyssey, a story that follows the meandering path of a single character through a vast and uncharted world. We will therefore save the Odyssey's geography, and a discussion of how it corresponds to the form of its plot, for the next chapter.

ARISTOTLE AND THE EUSYNOPTIC PLOT

The way in which Aristotle thought about plot, and, specifically, the way he thought about epic and tragic plots in the Poetics, was as a kind of mental image – an imaginary landscape.