This view should in its essentials be adopted. Every dramatist commits faults; but these apparent faults in the _Andromache_ prove too much. They tend to show not that Euripides is here inferior in construction and psychology to Sophocles, but that he is insane. Few readers could compose a speech like that of Andromache beginning ὦ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποισιν ἔχθιστοι βροτῶν, or like the messenger’s narrative. But we could all manage the exit of Menelaus better. There is one great general objection to Verrall’s theory. Is it not much too subtle? If readers have always missed the point, would not spectators do so even more certainly? Verrall, in answer, points to a passage in the Greek _Argument_: τὸ δὲ δρᾶμα τῶν δευτέρων, which he takes to mean “this play is one of the sequels”.[539] He believes that the audience had a sufficient knowledge of the earlier part of the story to follow the _Andromache_ with no perplexity. Whether this knowledge was given by an earlier play of Euripides is not of course certain, but may be regarded as likely. We next note a feature of equal importance—the atmosphere. Every reader observes strange anachronisms of sentiment and allusion—Hermione’s outburst[540] against women who destroy the confidence between husband and wife, Peleus’ comments on Lacedæmonian society,[541] and the like, which have no relevance to the “Homeric age” of the Trojan war. But the whole tone of the play is unheroic; even if these special features were removed it would remain quite unlike a Sophoclean drama. Euripides has, in fact, written a play about his own generation with a definite purpose. He takes stories from myths as the foundation of his plays, but his interest is in his own time. In spite of “thy mother Helen” and “the hapless town of the Phrygians,” his work concerns essentially fifth-century Athenians. Hence the almost complete absence of poetic colour, which is only found in the conventional lyrics and the goddess of the epilogue, who is no more in tune with the rest of the piece than a fairy-queen would be at the close of _A Doll’s House_. His chief concern is the danger to family life involved in the practice of slave-holding. Neoptolemus loses his life, and Hermione consents to the wreck of her own happiness, simply because of Andromache’s position in the home. She is the fulcrum which the astute villains employ; without her Hermione would never have been manageable.