Aristotle in his Poetics, for instance, says that certain plots in tragic drama pivot on a moment of anagnorisis, and others pivot on a sudden and total change of fortune, or metabasis; but the best kind of plot, Aristotle says, is the kind in which the moment of recognition is also, simultaneously, the moment of reversal of fortune. For Aristotle, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is the ideal play in part because it effects this double plot: Oedipus’ recognition that his wife is really his mother is also the moment of his downfall. But this twinning of recognition and reversal happens in the Odyssey,
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