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A) Aristotle, Poetics 1449b24-28: "Tragedy is the mimesis of a serious and complete action that has magnitude, with seasoned speech. ... The mimesis is done by those who perform [draô] instead of through narrative, bringing about through pity and fear the purification [katharsis] of such emotions [pathos pl.]."B) Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos 95-101
Creon: I will tell you what I heard from the god. Phoebus our lord clearly bids us to drive out the miasma which he said was harbored in this land, and not to nourish it so that it cannot be healed.Oedipus: With what sort of purification [katharsis]? What is the manner of the misfortune?
Creon: By banishing the man, or by paying back bloodshed with bloodshed, since it is this blood which brings the tempest on our polis.
C) Herodotus 1.35: Now it chanced that while Croesus was making arrangements for the wedding, there came to Sardis a man under a misfortune, who had upon his hands the stain of blood. He was by race a Phrygian, and belonged to the family of the king. Presenting himself at the palace of Croesus, he prayed to be admitted to purification [katharsis] according to the customs of the country. Now the Lydian method of purifying [katharsis] is very nearly the same as the Greek. Croesus granted the request, and went through all the customary rites [verb from katharsis].
D) Aristotle, Poetics : Reversal is a change from one state of affairs to its exact opposite, and this too, as I say, should be in conformance with probability or necessity. For example, in Oedipus, the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus by relieving him of his fear with regad to his mother, but by revealing his true identity, does the opposite of this. …Recognition, as the word itself indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, leading either to friendship or to hostility on the part of those persons who are marked for good fortune or bad. The best form of recognition is that which is accompanied by a reversal, as in the example from Oedipus. …for a recognition joined thus will be fraught with pity or with fear (the type of action tragedy is presumed to imitate) because misery and happiness alike will come to be realized in recognitions of this kind. …Two elements of the tragic plot, then, are Reversal and Recognition. A third element is suffering (pathos). We have said what reversal and recognition are; suffering is an action of a destructive or painful description, such as deaths that take place in the open, agonies of pain, wounds, and so on. (trans. J. Hutton [New York: W. W. Norton, 1970].
E) Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: His fate moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams convince us that we were. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfillment&emdash;the fulfillment of the wish of our childhood." (trans. A. A. Brill, in the Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, [New York: Random House, 1938]).
F) Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos 980-983
Don't be afraid of nuptials with your mother.
Many men before now have had sex with their mothers
in dreams. But he to whom these things
are as though nothing bears his life most easily.
Read (UH's own) Richard Armstrong's on-line essay "Oedipus as Evidence: The Theatrical Background to Freud's Oedipus Complex."Thucydides' description of the plague in Athens, courtesy of the Perseus Project.