Elis and Mantinea, which had been visited by Themistocles just after the Persian wars and had set up democracies on the Athenian model. It was Alcibiades who eventually succeeded in organizing this league in 420, and it seems likely that the _Andromache_ was sent to Argos for production in much the same spirit in which Pindar used to send his Chorus of Dancers with a new song to compliment some foreign king. The play seems to contain a reference to the Peloponnesian War (734), it indulges in curiously direct denunciations of the Spartans (445 ff., 595 ff.), and the Spartan Menelaus is the villain of the piece--a more stagey villain than Euripides in his better moments would have permitted. We have also one doubtful external record of our poet's temporary faith in Alcibiades. In the year 420 there fell an observance of the Olympian Festival, the greatest of all the Pan-Hellenic Games, which carried with it a religious truce. Alcibiades succeeded in getting Sparta convicted of a violation of this truce, and consequently excluded from the Festival, which was a marked blow at her prestige. Then, entering himself as a competitor, he won with his own horses a whole series of prizes, including the first, in the four-horse chariot competition. And Plutarch, in his _Life of Alcibiades_, refers to a Victory Ode which was written for him on this occasion, "as report goes, by the poet Euripides" (ch. 11). This revival of the Pindaric _Epinikion_ for a personal victory would fit in with the known character of Alcibiades; and it would be a sharp example of the irony of history if Euripides consented to write the Ode. 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.