In structure archaic, this play is in spirit something quite new to the Attic stage. On the one hand there is little unfolding of a plot; we are reminded strongly of the _Prometheus_ by the portrayal of a situation which changes with extreme slowness. It is the manner of this portrayal which is new and terrible. The _Troades_ was performed after the sack of Melos and before the departure of the Sicilian expedition; it is a statement, by a member of the nation which annihilated Melos, of the horrors wherewith the vanquished are overwhelmed. The glory won by the Greeks who overthrew Troy was the best-known and most cherished gift of tradition. Now a Greek writer reveals the other side of conquest. After the crime of Melos, Euripides never felt as he had felt towards Athens or Greece. His intellect and his heart were appalled by the cold ferocity of which his fellows showed themselves every year more capable. Hitherto he has attacked the evils of human nature; now he impeaches one definite nation, and that his own. No spectator could doubt that “Troy” is Melos, “the Greeks” Athens. Such uncompromising hostility must have produced deep effects on so impressionable an assembly. For it is not merely a denunciation; it is a threat. The poet takes the whole picture of misery and stupid tyranny, and puts it into sinister perspective in his prologue. All the cruelties of the play are committed by the Greeks under shadow of the calamity denounced against them by the deities of the prologue, whereof we are again and again reminded by the sentences casually dropped by Talthybius and others, that the host is eager to embark. And this when the great Athenian armament was itself thronging the Peiræus in preparation for the voyage to Sicily.[608]