ABSTRACT
In Chapter VI of The Poetics Aristotle is urging the prime importance of Plot among the constituent parts of tragedy, and one of his arguments is that, in Bywater’s words, ‘the most powerful elements of attraction in Tragedy, the Peripeties and Discoveries, are parts of the Plot’. He proceeds to define these terms in Chapter XI. Peripety
is the change from one state of things within the play to its opposite of the kind described, and that too in the way we are saying, in the probable or necessary sequence of events; as it is for instance in Oedipus: here the opposite of things is produced by the Messenger, who, coming to gladden Oedipus and to remove his fears as to his mother, reveals the secret of his birth.
