Travellers in those days followed a few main routes; half
a dozen great seaports were rendezvous for all the world; the
slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the
corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus
such a plot as that of the _Menaechmi_ was by no means the sheer
impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable
Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a
coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my
mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing
children, on which the _Oedipus_, and many plays of Menander, are
founded, was common in historic Greece, and that the hapless children
were generally provided with identification-tokens _gnorismata_.]
_CHAPTER XVI_
LOGIC
The term logic is often very vaguely used in relation to drama. French
writers especially, who regard logic as one of the peculiar faculties of
their national genius, are apt to insist upon it in and out of season.
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