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114 Euripides' delusion was natural and it was short-lived. The Suppliant Women points towards peace, and the true policy of Alcibiades was to make peace impossible. And even apart from that the ideals of the two men were antipathetic. The matter is summed up in the Frogs of Aristophanes, produced in 405, when the only question remaining about Alcibiades was whether he was more dangerous to the city as an honoured leader or as an enemy and exile. The two great poets of the Dead are asked for their advice on this particular subject and their answers are clear. Aeschylus says: "Submit to the lion's whelp;" Euripides rejects him with three scathing lines (Frogs, 1427 ff., cf. 1446 ff.). Long before the date of the Frogs Alcibiades had probably grown to be in the mind of Euripides the very type and symbol of the evil times.

All Greece—we have the emphatic and disinterested testimony of Thucydides for the statement—was gradually corrupted and embittered by the long war. Probably all war, as it accustoms people more and more to desperate needs and desperate expedients for meeting them, and sets more and more aside the common generosities and