336 Aristotle's treatise on poetry. they afterwards discover; like (Edipus, in Sophocles. There, indeed, the action itself does not make a part of the drama : the Alcmceon of Astydamas^ and Telegonus in the Ulysses Wounded, furnish instances within the Tragedy. There is yet a third way, where a person upon the point of perpetrating, through ignorance, some dreadful deed, is pre- vented by a sudden discovery. Besides these, there is no other proper way. For the action must of necessity be either done or not done, and that either with knowledge, or without: but of all these ways, that of being ready to execute, know- ingly, and yet not executing, is the worst; for this is, at the same time, shocking, and yet not tragic, because it exhibits no disastrous event. [It is, therefore, never, or very rarely, made use of The attempt of Hcemon to kill Creon, in the Antigone, is an example ] Next to this, is the actual execution of the purpose. To execute, through ignorance, and afterwards to discover, is better : for thus the shocking atrociousness is avoided, and, at the same time, the discovery is striking. But the best of all these ways is the last. Thus, in the Tragedy of CrespJiontes, Merope, in the very act of putting her son to death, dis- covers him, and is prevented. In the Iphigenia, the sister, in the same manner, discovers her brother; and in the Helle, the son discovers his mother, at the instant when he was going to betray her. On this account it is, that the subjects of Tragedy, as before re- marked, are confined to a small number of families. For it was not to art, but to fortune, that poets applied themselves to find incidents of this nature. Hence the necessity of having recourse to those families in which such calamities have happened. Of the plot, or story, and its requisites, enough has now been said. 2
Cap. XVI. What is meant by a Discovery has already been explained. Its OntheaVa- Jdnds are the followine^. ypjopia-i? in ^ particular. First, the most inarti6cial of all, and to which, from poverty of invention, the generality of poets have recourse — The discovery by visi- ble signs [-q 8ta crqix€t(x)v). Of these signs, some are natural; as the lance with which the family of the earth-born Thebans were marked : others are adventitious {iTTLKTr^To) : and of these, some are corporal, as scars ; some external, as necklaces, bracelets, &c., or the little boat by which 1 As this view of the passage in the Antigone, iioo, is clearly erroneous (Introduc- tion to the Antigone, p. xl.) it is well to have the reasons adduced by Ritter for believing that Aristotle is interpolated here. — J. W. D. 3 ^QQ p. 2^0, below.
