In character-drawing just as much as in the arrangement of the incidents one should always seek what is inevitable or probable, so as to make it inevitable or probable that such and such a person should say or do such and such; and inevitable or probable that one thing should follow another.

Clearly therefore the denouementOr unravelling. of each play should also be the result of the plot itself and not produced mechanically as in the and the incident of the embarkation in the Iliad. Hom. Il. 2.155-181, where it is only the arbitrary (i.e., uncaused) intervention of Athene which stays the flight of the Greeks. In the the heroine, having killed her rival and her children, is spirited away in the chariot ot the Sun, a result not caused by what has gone before.

The god in the carThe μηχανή or car was a sort of crane with a pulley attached, which was fixed at the top of the back-scene in the left corner of the stage. By it a god or hero could be lowered or raised or exhibited motionless in mid-air. Weak dramatists thus introduced a car to cut the knot by declaring the denouement instead of unravelling the plot by the logic of cause and effect. It was presumably on such a car that Medea was borne away. should only be used to explain what lies outside the play, either what happened earlier and is therefore beyond human knowledge, or what happens later and needs to be foretold in a proclamation. For we ascribe to the gods the power of seeing everything.

There must, however, be nothing inexplicable in the incidents, or, if there is, it must lie outside the tragedy. There is an example in Sophocles’ .i.e., Oedipus had killed Laius in a wayside quarrel, not knowing who he was. When his subjects at Thebes crave his help to remove the curse which is blighting their crops, he pledges himself to discover the murderer of Laius. It may seem odd that he should not know enough about the details of the murder to connect it in his mind with his own murderous quarrel. But that was long ago, and neither an audience nor a novel-reader is critical about incidents which occur long before the point at which the story begins. See chapter Aristot. Poet. 24.20.

Since tragedy is a representation of men better than ourselves we must copy the good portrait-painters who, while rendering the distinctive form and making a likeness, yet paint people better than they are. It is the same with the poet. When representing people who are hot-tempered or lazy, or have other such traits of character, he should make them such, yet men of worth [an example of hardness]Apparently a note on Achilles which has been copied by mistake into the text.; take the way in which Agathon and Homer portray Achilles.