Keep, then, a careful eye on these rules and also on the appeal to the eyei.e., stage-craft rather than staging. which is necessarily bound up with the poet’s business; for that offers many opportunities of going wrong. But this subject has been adequately discussed in the published treatises.As distinct from the body of esoteric doctrine circulated by oral teaching among Aristotle’s pupils.

What a Discovery is has been already stated.In chapter 11.As for kinds of Discovery, first comes the least artistic kind, which is largely used owing to incompetence—discovery by tokens.

These may be congenital, like the spear the Earth-born bear or stars, like those which CarcinusA prolific tragedian of the early fourth century. The family are agreeably ridiculed in Aristophanes’ . uses in his These were birth-marks. The spear-head distinguished the descendants of the Spartoi at Thebes; the star or bright spot on the descendants of Pelops commemorated his ivory shoulder, and in Carcinus’s play it seems to have survived cooking.;

or they may be acquired and these may be on the body, for instance, wounds, or external things like necklaces, and in the A play by Sophocles. Tyro’s twins by Poseidon, who appeared to her in the guise of the river Enipeus, were exposed in a little boat or ark, like Moses in the bulrushes, and this led to their identification. the discovery by means of the boat.

There is a better and a worse way of using these tokens; for instance Odysseus, by means of his wound, was discovered in one way by the nurse and in another way by the swine-herds.Hom. Od. 19.386ff., 205ff. The first came about automatically, the second was a deliberate demonstration to prove the point. Aristotle here distinguishes between a discovery inevitably produced by the logic of events (e.g. it was inevitable or at least probable that Odysseus, arriving as a strange traveller, should be washed by Eurycleia, and that she should thus see the old scar on his thigh and discover his identity) and a discovery produced by a deliberate declaration (e.g. Odysseus’s declaration of his identity to Eumaeus). The latter kind is manufactured by the poet, not logically caused by what has gone before.