It is somewhat remarkable that Professor Verrall, who fully recognized the dependence of this unity upon local conditions and published eminently sensible observations on the subject, nevertheless felt constrained to challenge the obvious interpretation of two plays in which a glaring violation of the unity of time occurs. In the _Agamemnon_ he supposed the watchman and the populace (including the chorus) to be misinformed as to the meaning of the beacon and that it really served to Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and their supporters as a warning of Agamemnon’s being close at hand! His elucidation of Euripides’ _Andromache_ was still more ingenious and complicated.[326] But to bolster up such interpretations Mr. Verrall ought to have explained away all similar instances as well—to explain, for example, how in Euripides’ _Suppliants_ an Attic army can march from Eleusis to the vicinity of Thebes and fight a battle there, and how tidings of the victory can be brought back to Eleusis, all between vss. 598 and 634, which, as Dryden[327] expressed it, “is not for every mile a verse.” Nevertheless not the slightest attention is paid to such patent impossibilities, and in every case the whole action is unmistakably supposed to fall within a day. In view of the foregoing it is not surprising that Aristotle does mention the unity of time, though only incidentally. His exact language is: “Tragedy and epic differ, again, in their length: for tragedy endeavors, so far as possible, to keep within a single circuit of the sun (περίοδος ἡλίου), or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the epic action has no limits of time.”[328] “Endeavors” (πειρᾶται) was mistranslated as _doit_ by some French writers. Aristotle rather commends the unity of time as a rough generalization which works out well in practice than enjoins it as an invariable rule. Actually the restriction was further reduced, in most cases, to the hours of daylight, and Dacier even maintained that περίοδος ἡλίου means no more than twelve hours. But Aristophanes’ _Plutus_ and Terence’s _Self-Tormentor_ (see pp. 253, above) furnish clear examples of dramatic action beginning in the late afternoon of one day and not concluding until the next day.