10b
Clearly therefore the denouementOr unravelling. of each play should also be the result of the plot itself and not produced mechanically as in the Medea 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 Medea 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.
10c
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.
10d
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’ Oedipus.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.
