The criticism in this play, as in that of "Balaustion's Adventure," may be considered either as representing some phase of contemporary opinion about Aristophanes or as expressing the opinion of the poet himself. Balaustion's indignation is especially aroused by the two plays, "The Lusistrata" and the "Thesmophoriazousai," both of which she finds utterly detestable. It is interesting to compare with this entirely unfavorable criticism the feeling of such distinguished classical scholars as Gilbert Murray and J. A. Symonds. The first Murray describes as a play "full of daring indecency, it is true, but the curious thing is that Aristophanes, while professing to ridicule the women, is all through on their side. The jokes made by the superior sex at the expense of the inferior--to give them their Roman names--are seldom remarkable either for generosity or refinement, and it is our author's pleasant humor to accuse everybody of every vice he can think of at the moment. Yet with the single exception that he credits women with an inordinate fondness for wine parties--the equivalent it would seem of afternoon tea--he makes them on the whole perceptibly more sensible and more sympathetic than his men." Of the second play Symonds speaks with actual enthusiasm. "It has a regular plot--an intrigue and a solution--and its persons are not allegorical but real. Thus it approaches the standard of modern comedy. But the plot, though gigantic in its scale, and prodigious in its wealth of wit and satire, is farcical. The artifices by which Euripides endeavors to win Agathon to undertake his cause, the disguise of Muesilochus in female attire, the oratory of the old man against the women in the midst of their assembly, his detection, the momentary suspension of the dramatic action by his seizure of the supposed baby, his slaughter of the swaddled wine jar, his apprehension by Cleisthenes, the devices and disguises by which Euripides endeavors to extricate his father-in-law from the scrape, and the final _ruse_ by which he eludes the Scythian bowmen, and carries off Muesilochus in triumph--all these form a series of highly diverting comic scenes." Again, "There is no passage in Aristophanes more amusing than the harangue of Muesilochus. The portrait, too, of Agathon in the act of composition is exquisitely comic. But the crowning sport of the 'Thesmophoriazousai' is in the last scene when Muesilochus adapts the Palamedes and the Helen of Euripides to his own forlorn condition, jumbling up the well-known verses of these tragedies with coarse-flavored, rustical remarks; and when at last Euripides, himself, acts Echo and Perseus to the Andromeda of his father-in-law, and both together mystify the policeman by their ludicrous utterance of antiphonal lamentation." In her welcome of him, Balaustion expresses rather what she thinks he might be than what she really thinks he is. She welcomes him: