Greek tragedies and detective fiction both incorporate Aristotle’s peripeteia and anagnorisis. Peripeteia is a term meaning reversal, a change from one state to the other. Aristotle’s term anagnorisis is a discovery that produces a change from ignorance to knowledge. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, the city of Thebes is suffering a plague in which their fields and women are barren, and the only way to end the plague was to discover the truth behind the murder of King Laius. The point when Oedipus receives notice from a Messenger that he is not the son of Polybus is the peripeteia in which leads Oedipus to realize that he married his mother and murdered his father. Once Oedipus comes to realize that truth about his life, he experiences anagnorisis.
