In Medias Res, From Horace's Own Lines

In medias res (Latin for "into the middle of things") means starting a story in the middle of the action, with what came before told later or left out. The phrase comes from the Roman poet Horace, who used it in his Ars Poetica to praise the way Homer begins his poems.

Horace was writing a verse letter about poetry, not a writing manual, and the phrase sits in two lines about Homer. It became one of the oldest pieces of storytelling advice still in use. The English translation quoted below is H. Rushton Fairclough's, in the Loeb Classical Library edition (first published 1926); the Latin and line numbers are from the same edition.

What Does In Medias Res Mean?

Literally, "into the middle of things". The story opens on events already under way, and the reader is dropped in without an introduction. The causes, the history and the people's pasts come later, in the characters' memories and conversations, in a flashback, or not at all.

It is a choice about the order of telling, not about what happens. The story's events still have a beginning, a middle and an end. The book just doesn't start at the beginning of them.

Where Does In Medias Res Come From?

From Horace's Ars Poetica, lines 146 to 149. He has just mocked a poet who opens with a grand promise, "Of Priam's fate and famous war I'll sing", and compares him with Homer, quoting the first lines of the Odyssey. Then he says what Homer doesn't do, and what he does:

nec reditum Diomedis ab interitu Meleagri, nec gemino bellum Troianum orditur ab ovo; semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res non secus ac notas auditorem rapit

In Fairclough's translation: "Nor does he begin Diomede's return from the death of Meleager, or the war of Troy from the twin eggs. Ever he hastens to the issue, and hurries his hearer into the story's midst, as if already known".

Three things are packed into those lines.

• Don't start too far back. Meleager was Diomede's uncle, so beginning Diomede's journey home with Meleager's death is starting a generation early. The "twin eggs" are the egg Helen hatched from: Fairclough's note says "i.e. from the birth of Helen". Telling the Trojan War from there is starting before the war has a cause.
• Get to the point. "Ever he hastens to the issue". Homer heads for the outcome.
• Treat the reader as if they know. "As if already known": Homer doesn't stop to explain who everyone is. The reader catches up.

Horace adds a fourth that writers forget. Homer also leaves things out: "what he fears he cannot make attractive with his touch he abandons". In medias res isn't only moving the backstory later. Some of it never appears.

He also sets a condition on all this rearranging. Homer, he says, invents and blends so well "that the middle is not discordant with the beginning, nor the end with the middle". Starting in the middle is only half the job. When the earlier events finally arrive, they have to fit what the reader has already seen.

What Is the Opposite of In Medias Res?

Ab ovo, "from the egg": starting a story at its very beginning and telling everything in order. It comes from the same lines of Horace, as the thing Homer doesn't do.

Neither is wrong. Plenty of novels open at the start of the story and are none the worse for it. Horace's point is narrower: start where the story's interest starts, not where its history does.

Examples of In Medias Res

The classical epics are the standard examples, and each one shows a different way of handling what came before.

• The Iliad. It opens with "the anger of Achilles", in the tenth year of a ten-year war, and the poem covers a few weeks of it (in Book 2 Odysseus recalls the prophecy "so shall we fight nine years at Troy, but in the tenth shall take the town"). Homer never goes back to tell the war's start. Aristotle praised exactly this in the Poetics: Homer "never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem", but "detaches a single portion".
• The Odyssey. It opens near the end of Odysseus's ten years of wandering, with him held on Calypso's island. The famous adventures, the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, are told by Odysseus himself, at a feast, in Books 9 to 12. He even admits the problem of where to start: "I do not know how to begin, nor yet how to continue and conclude my tale".
• The Aeneid. Virgil opens with Aeneas's fleet caught in a storm, years after Troy fell. At Carthage, Dido asks him to tell the story "from their first beginning", for "this is now the seventh summer that bears thee a wanderer", and in Books 2 and 3 he tells the fall of Troy and his travels since.
• Paradise Lost. Milton names the technique in the prose Argument to Book 1: the rebellion in Heaven is "past over", and "the Poem hasts into the midst of things, presenting Satan with his Angels now fallen into Hell". The war in Heaven is told later, by the angel Raphael.

The pattern is the same each time. Open on the crisis, then let a character tell the past to someone who needs to hear it. In modern novels the same move appears as the thriller that opens mid-chase, or the literary novel that starts on the day everything changes and folds the history into memory as it goes.

Who Said "In Medias Res"? Three Common Mix-Ups

The phrase is quoted everywhere, and three errors come up again and again.

• It isn't Aristotle's. Aristotle made a related point about Homer in chapter 23 of the Poetics, that he chose one part of the war rather than all of it, but the phrase is Latin and it is Horace's, written about three centuries later.
• There are two "ab ovo"s in Horace. In the Ars Poetica, the egg is Helen's: the war told from her birth. In the Satires (1.3), "ab ovo usque ad mala", "from the egg-course to the fruit" in Fairclough's version, is a Roman dinner from first course to dessert, said of a singer who never stops. That line is where the idiom "from beginning to end" comes from, and it has nothing to do with Helen. The two are easy to run together, but only the first is about where a story starts.
• It isn't a rule to start with an action scene. Horace's "midst" is the middle of the story's events, not a fight or a chase. A quiet scene can be in medias res if the story is already under way, and a car chase isn't if it has nothing to do with what follows.

How Do You Handle Backstory After Opening In Medias Res?

Opening in the middle creates a debt: the reader is owed the context sooner or later. Each of the epics above pays it in a slightly different way.

1. Withhold it until it's wanted. Odysseus tells his story only once the Phaeacians want to know who he is. A flashback lands harder when the reader is already asking the question it answers.
2. Give it to a character with a reason to tell it. Dido asks; Aeneas answers. Backstory told to someone in the story is a scene, with a listener who reacts.
3. Trickle it in. A line of memory here, a remark there. Most modern novels do this, in place of one long flashback, and it avoids the stalled opening that telling instead of showing produces.
4. Cut what doesn't earn its place. Horace's Homer "abandons" what he can't make shine. The Iliad never tells the start of the war.

One test helps: if you removed the backstory scene, would the reader miss it? If not, it is there for the writer, not the reader.

In medias res is also different from a prologue. A prologue is a separate opening, often from another time or viewpoint. In medias res is where the main story itself begins.

A Worked Example

A mountain guide, Ilse, once let go of a rope on a pass, and her brother fell. He lived, and never forgave her. Twenty years on, he asks her to take him over the same pass in winter.

Told ab ovo, from the egg, the book runs in order:

1. The rope. As a girl, Ilse lets go of the rope. Her brother falls.
2. The letter. Twenty years on, he writes and asks her to guide him.
3. The ledge. Halfway up the pass in a whiteout, he slips, and she has the rope again.
4. The hut. They reach the hut, and he asks why she came.

Told in medias res, it opens on the ledge, with her brother's weight on the rope and no explanation. The hut follows. Only then, when the reader already wants to know why this matters so much, does the book go back to the rope. The letter may not need a scene at all: one line in the hut can carry it.

Same events, same ending. The order is what changed, and with it the first thing the reader feels.

How Do You Open a Novel In Medias Res in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app, and its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every document in the book, each with a synopsis. The board's order is the book's order, so it is where you try out an opening in the middle.

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each scene with Add › Scene, in the order the events happen.
2. In each synopsis, write what happens. Look for the first scene where the story is already in trouble.
3. Hover over that card and drag it by its grip (Drag to reorder, in the card's top right corner) to the front of the board. The scenes before it move along.
4. Drag the next scene of the present action in after it, so the backstory sits later in the book.
5. Open one scene and make two labels, "Now" and "Backstory" (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses). Give the backstory a colour of its own, and set one label on every card.
6. Switch the Outliner to its list. Every scene is a row with its label, so you can see where each piece of backstory now falls, and how long the book runs before the first one.

The Outliner is the book's reading order. The order the events actually happened in can live in Deckle's Timeline: link each event to its scene, and the Reading order button numbers each event by its chapter's place in the book, so a flashback shows as a number out of sequence. Where the opening should fall is also a question of the inciting incident, the event that starts the story, which an in medias res opening often lands on or just after.

Common Mistakes

• Starting in the middle of nothing. A fight with strangers, for no reason the reader can grasp, isn't the middle of things. It is noise. The opening has to belong to the story that follows.
• Explaining straight away. A dramatic first page followed by ten pages of history undoes the choice. Let the reader wait.
• A false start. Opening on a crisis that turns out to be a dream, or a test, spends the reader's trust.
• Too many mysteries at once. "As if already known" works when the reader can follow what's happening, even without knowing why. Confusion isn't intrigue.
• Keeping every scrap of backstory. Horace's advice includes leaving out what doesn't shine.

Sources

Retrieved 25 October 2026.

• Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, with an English translation by H. Rushton Fairclough (Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann and Harvard University Press; first printed 1926, revised 1929, read in the 1942 reprint): Ars Poetica lines 136 to 152, pp. 462 and 463, and Satires 1.3, lines 6 and 7 (archive.org).
• Horace, Ars Poetica, Latin text, The Latin Library.
• Aristotle, Poetics, translated by S. H. Butcher, chapter 23 (Project Gutenberg).
• Homer, The Iliad, translated by Samuel Butler, Books 1 and 2 (Project Gutenberg).
• Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler, Books 1 and 9 (Project Gutenberg).
• Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by J. W. Mackail, Books 1 and 2 (Project Gutenberg).
• John Milton, Paradise Lost, the Argument to Book 1, The John Milton Reading Room, Dartmouth College.