The second act is a series of attempts by Euripides to rescue his defender. In the first episode the tragedian appears disguised as the Menelaus of his Helen. Old Mnesilochus is the fair but frail queen, and the scene is _supposed_ to change to Egypt. But the women refuse to let their captive free, and he is finally handed over to a north-country policeman, an illiterate gentleman with a very strong accent. On him Euripides tries the effect of another tragedy. Disguised as Perseus he insists that Mnesilochus is the captive maiden, Andromeda, and that he has come to release her. But the policeman proves obdurate. Then Euripides plays his last card. Remembering that all policemen have a _faiblesse_ for the weaker sex, he disguises himself as an old woman, and comes in, leading by the hand a young and attractive female. The policeman begins at once to soften, and when the plump flute-girl sits down on his knee he capitulates, murmuring, ‘What a swaät toöng: it’s reaäl Attic hoöney!’ A last vestige of professional caution makes him ask the old lady her name. Euripides, having to choose a title, chooses a good one, and says, ‘Artemisia,’ which the policeman enters as ‘Artamouxia’ in his note-book, and then, handing over the custody of his prisoner to the old lady he retires indoors with his young acquaintance. The other pair hasten to make their escape, and the play ends with the policeman’s despairing cry, ‘Artamouxia, Artamouxia, where are you?’ The _Lysistrata_, ‘breaker up of armies,’ is a much stronger play, and the heroine is a masterpiece of dramatic characterisation. From the beginning of the action, when she stands in the darkness waiting for the women she has summoned, and frowning with impatience—‘although a frown spoils her looks,’ as her one companion tells her—until the end, when, her purpose accomplished, she can say, ‘Let man stand by woman and woman by man. Good luck to all, and pray God that we make no more of these mistakes,’ she is a real living woman. If Aristophanes had written nothing else, _Lysistrata_ shows that he understood the female mind almost as well as Euripides himself: better far than most women authors, except only the incomparable Jane, to whose Emma in masterfulness and independence the Athenian lady bears a close resemblance. The plot of the play is simple. Under the lead of Lysistrata the women of Athens make a league with the women of Sparta, Bœotia, Corinth, and the other Greek States (for the solidarity of women is one of the key-notes of the play), to stop the war. For this purpose they put into effect both active and passive measures: they bind themselves by oath to have no further intercourse with their husbands until peace is made (the women at first object, but under the lead of the athletic Spartan finally agree), and they also seize the Acropolis with the treasury. The old men left at home, and the officials, for most of the men are at the war, try to