The case to be made in this book is that Sophocles (and Euripides) took traditional legends and employed them to make highly pertinent observations on contemporary military and political events. That this sort of investigation is supposed to be off-limits only adds to the interest of the exercise. For more than a hundred years now, most students of Sophocles, for example, have followed unquestioningly the dictum of the highly respected Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931) that “no Sophoclean tragedy has any immediate connection with a contemporary event”. Students of Euripides have only gingerly followed Günther Zuntz in admitting that some at least of Euripides' plays might be political. There has been, it is true, a vogue more recently for ascribing definitive political messages to the tragic poets. This development has been criticized, in some respects rightly, for it has led to a proliferation of disparate political interpretations, most of which are inevitably off-target. Many fail because they speak in generalities about macro-political themes: for example, the endorsement of aristocratic paternalism and imperial hegemony, competing models of elite leadership or “a [strong] contemporary application to the problems of the Athenian polis”. But both they and their critics go astray in overlooking – or rejecting – the possibility that the themes might be micro-political and be concerned with the role played in politics by specific individuals.