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.Hom. Od. 19.392. See preceding note.

In the second place come those which are manufactured by the poet and are therefore inartistic. For instance, in the Euripides’ . See Aristot. Poet. 11.8, note. 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.To prove his identity Orestes mentions Pelops’ lance and other things from home, which is much the same as producing visible tokens. And there is the voice of the shuttleWhen Philomela’s tongue was cut out, she wove in embroidery the story of her rape by Tereus. Thus the facts were discovered to her sister, Procne, by deliberate demonstration. In Sophocles’ .

The third kind is due to memory, to showing distress on seeing something. An example of this is the scene in the by Dicaeogenes; on seeing the picture he burst into tearsTeucer, returning to Salamis in disguise and seeing a portrait of his dead father Telamon, burst into tears and was thus discovered. So, too, in Julia is discovered because she swoons on hearing Valentine offer Sylvia to his rival.: and again in the Tale of Alcinous,Hom. Od. 8.521ff. hearing the minstrel he remembered and burst into tears; and thus they were recognized.

The fourth kind results from an inference; for instance, in the Someone like me has come; but nobody is like me except Orestes; therefore he has come. And there is Polyidus’sA Sophist who either wrote an with this denouement or more probably suggested in a work of criticism (cf. Aristot. Poet. 17.6) that Orestes on being led to his fate should speculate aloud upon the odd coincidence that both he and his sister should be sacrificed, thus revealing his identity to Iphigeneia. Like most critics, Polyidos would have been a poor dramatist. There is an example of this form of discovery in the French opera , where the old knight says goddam and is thus discovered to be an Englishman. 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’ that having come to find a son, he is perishing himself. And the scene in the , 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.In these cases the inference was presumably uttered aloud and hence the identity of the speakers discovered. Nothing else is known of these plays.