Poetics (16.5-16.9)

Discovery scenes constructed to prove the point are inartistic and so are all such scenes, but those are better which arise out of a reversal scene, as, for instance, in The Washing.[*]

In the second place come those which are manufactured by the poet and are therefore inartistic. For instance, in the Iphigeneia[*] Orestes revealed himself. She was revealed to him through the letter,

but Orestes says himself what the poet wants and not what the plot requires. So this comes near to the fault already mentioned, for he might just as well have actually brought some tokens.[*] And there is the voice of the shuttle[*] In Sophocles’ Tereus.

The third kind is due to memory, to showing distress on seeing something.

The fourth kind results from an inference; for instance, in the Choephoroe Someone like me has come; but nobody is like me except Orestes; therefore he has come. And there is Polyidus’s[*] idea about Iphigeneia, for it is likely enough that Orestes should make an inference that, whereas his sister was sacrificed, here is the same thing happening to him. And in Theodectes’ Tydeus that having come to find a son, he is perishing himself. And the scene in the Phineidae, where on seeing the spot the women inferred their fate, that they were meant to die there for it was there that they had been exposed.[*]