Fiction is More Important than History

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse - you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it really consists in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do - which is the aim of poetry, though it affixes proper names to the characters. 

This got me thinking about about the bible and biblical myths as poetry (remember Aristotle means poetry in the sense of "maker of stories"). They are stories of a universal nature upon which we have affixed names. Perhaps if we mix these stories in with history, they become even more compelling. They are of a universal nature, but we say that they are historical, they actually did occur. Then we use archetypal symbolism - again, the universal nature.

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