All the poetry and romance of the story have disappeared: realism has triumphed. Io is a woman; on the best interpretation of her conduct she is vain and imprudent; she shows herself to strange men, and is carried off by them, although, as the story is at pains, though not very logically, to add, it must have been with her own consent. On the worst interpretation she is a mere wanton. She allows a sea-captain to seduce her, and then deserts her home, her parents, and her native land.

Listen now to Æschylus—in the beautiful version by Mr. E. R. Bevan:

The story is the same, but the treatment is different, and the two passages illustrate the difference between romantic idealism and realistic depreciation.

But Io, in the Prometheus, is only one of the gallery of Æschylus’ heroines, for in his art women take the foremost place. The dramatist is at variance with his age, and his fervent patriotism is almost the sole bond of union between him and his fellows. Æschylus is a mystic; he believed in the Delphic inspiration, and took an interest in religious speculation. His contemporaries were materialists, suspected the politics of Delphi, and regarded religion simply as a ceremony. Æschylus was a conservative in politics, although a liberal in thought; Athens was already becoming an extreme democracy. Finally, Æschylus bases his theatre on women, and makes them the chief agents of the drama, while the ordinary woman of his time was shut out altogether from the active business of life.

But he is an unconscious feminist, and the definite purpose which we find in Euripides is quite absent from his plays. It shows, however, a strange lack of appreciation to reproach him, as some critics have done, with neglecting the feminine interest. Of the seven tragedies that the Byzantine tradition has preserved for us, four, if their subject was handled by a modern dramatist, would be called feminist problem plays, and in the other three the female characters supply most of the dramatic interest, even though the first idea of the plot might seem to put them in the second plan of action.

Of the lost plays, many, as far as we may judge by their titles and meagre fragments, have the same characteristic. The most famous, the Niobe, had for its central figure the sorrowing mother, such another as Euripides’ Hecuba in the first scene of the Trojan Women, and represented perhaps in much the same fashion, for Æschylus, like most Athenian women, knew full well the dramatic value of silence, and the pathos of Niobe’s situation needs no long speeches. So, if we possessed the Callisto, the legend of the maiden changed into a bear, the Penelope, the Iphigenia, or the Oreithyia, that favourite Athenian story of the young girl roaming on the sea-shore and carried off by the fierce god to his northern fastness, we should appreciate even more vividly than we can now the romantic side of the tragedian’s art. It is a significant fact in this connection that of the sixty odd titles of lost plays which have come down to us, nearly half are names of women. Moreover, in seventeen of these plays, the title is taken from the chorus, and in the Æschylean Theatre the chorus is generally the central figure in the dramatic action. Such titles as the ‘Daughters of the Sun,’ the ‘Nurses of Dionysus,’ the ‘Daughters of Nereus,’ and the ‘Bacchanal Women,’ suggest at any rate romantic plays with a strong feminine interest; such others as the ‘Women of the Bedchamber,’ the ‘Water-carriers,’ and the ‘Women of Etna,’ might well be examples of that realistic treatment of women’s life of which we have an example in the Nurse of the ‘Libation-bearers.’ Arguments drawn merely from the names of lost plays are obviously of little value, except in so far as they strengthen the definite evidence which the existing tragedies supply, but an examination of the remaining seven plays will show that the first and greatest of Athenian dramatists was deeply impressed with the potentialities for good and evil of the female mind.

VI.—Æschylus and Sophocles

Of the seven plays of Æschylus that remain, three—the Seven against Thebes, the Persians, and the Prometheus—are concerned with battles, and with strife among men and among gods. It might be expected that women here would play but a small part, but, as a matter of fact, in two of the three the chorus, the intermediary between poet and audience, is composed of women, and in the third a woman is the chief character.

The Seven against Thebes is a patriotic drama, ‘crammed full of the spirit of war,’ as the poet himself describes it, and also full of speeches. The male characters talk; what little action there is in the play falls to the women of the chorus. Their first song, for example, when they call on the gods to save them from the ravages of war, was probably accompanied by more vigorous movements than anything in the rest of the tragedy. The unsympathetic male, Eteocles, addresses them, it is true, as ‘unbearable creatures’ and ‘detestable animals,’ and says, ‘For my own part, I never want to share my house with any womankind, nor take them to my troubles and my joys;’ but his remarks are strictly in keeping with his unpleasant character, and the poet instinctively relies on the female characters for his chief dramatic interest. So in the Persians, a chronicle play composed mainly of choral odes and messengers’ speeches, the queen-mother, Atossa, takes the first place in the action, and the psychological contrast lies between her womanly strength and Xerxes’ manly weakness. In the Prometheus, certainly, most of the characters—gods and demi-gods—are males, but they have little dramatic significance. As far as they are concerned, the play is a good example of what Maeterlinck calls the ‘static drama.’ The characters stand still, and talk. The action is in the hands of the female characters, the pathetic figure of the wandering cow-maiden, Io, and the contrasted group of the mermaid chorus, the daughters of the sea. These latter are perhaps the most charming of all the poet’s creations, and the fragrance that heralds their approach, when, casting away modesty, they venture to appear before a man, spreads through the whole play. Sympathising, but not quite without merriment; inquisitive, but staunch in the hour of danger; they are just such characters as Nausicaa herself.

In these three plays, then, the feminine interest has forced its way, as it were, into the plot, which in its first form offered women no place. The Seven against Thebes, a ‘fragment from the table of Homer,’ differs chiefly from the epic in the feminine element that has been imported by the chorus; the Persians, dealing with the same events as those described by Herodotus, has for its point of difference the prominence given to the female character, Atossa; the Prometheus, which tells the story of the conflict between the fierce young god and the philanthropic old demiurge, relies for its dramatic interest largely on the episodes of the Nereides and Io; episodes which, strictly speaking, have nothing to do with the main plot.

This feminism, inherent in the poet’s mind, finds full expression in the remaining four plays. The Suppliant Women, for example, archaic though it seems to us, deals with a social problem and a question of law, which was hotly debated in the poet’s time, and finally, in spite of his advocacy, settled against the women. The question is this—‘Should a woman be compelled to marry a man she dislikes, and to hand over to him the control of her property, merely because he is the nearest male relative?’ Æschylus answers in the negative; Athenian law decided in the affirmative.

The characters in the play are nearly all women, the fifty daughters of Danaus, accompanied by their old father, who have fled from Egypt to Greece in order to escape from the violence of their cousins, the sons of Ægyptus, who wish to marry them by force. It is a lyric drama, and the burden of the action and the music rests with the women. The agony of the crowd of girls crouching helpless at the altar is depicted in the most entrancing melody; they are not regarded as separate individuals, but as representing women in general; their plight is that of all womankind, and the problem is presented as universal. Swarthy daughters of the South, they call upon their god to help them, the god who once found delight in the arms of their ancestress, Io; and in the play their prayer is answered. The King of Argos protects and gives them shelter, the Egyptian herald who would have taken them back is scornfully dismissed. Of the three male characters Danaus is the most interesting, and his advice to his daughters is applicable to women generally in ancient times:

So in his concluding words he hints at some of the difficulties of a woman’s life:

The Suppliant Women presents one particular phase of women’s subjection considered impersonally, and scarcely deals with the great question of how far force may be rightly met by force. In the legend the daughters of Danaus escape from slavery by killing their husbands on their wedding night, but of that Æschylus in this play tells us nothing.

The problem, however, is too vital to escape his notice, and it forms the central motive of the greatest play in world-literature, the Agamemnon. ‘Is a woman ever justified in killing her husband?’ The question had a special interest in Athens, as it must have in any society where women are kept enslaved, for the tyrant always walks in dread of the assassin’s knife. Euripides, with his stinging irony, reveals the secret fear: ‘If women are to be allowed to shed male blood,’ he makes Orestes cry, ‘then we men had better commit suicide at once; if it is a matter only of the will to kill, we may be sure that all women have that already.’ The Agamemnon deals with this problem; the sequel plays with a second question, ‘Is it right for a son to kill his mother in order to avenge his father’s death?’

But the trilogy of the Oresteia, besides being concerned with feminist problems, is a living gallery of woman types: Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Electra and the Nurse, the chorus of maidens in the Choephoroi, and the chorus of women furies in the Eumenides. In the Agamemnon the two women are sharply contrasted; Clytemnestra, the queen who will not submit to man’s rule; Cassandra, the victim predestined by fate to suffer the caprices of a master, and to pass from the treacherous lover, Apollo, to the brutal owner, Agamemnon. No one can read the play and feel much sympathy with the murdered king. He is done to death with every circumstance of horror; returning home after many years’ absence in a foreign land, where he has been fighting for his country, he finds within his house not a faithful wife, but a secret enemy; she conceals her hatred, allures him to the bath, and there, with her own hands, murders him.

And yet the dramatist, and his readers, find the wife rather than the husband the sympathetic character. It is partly the intolerable callousness and brutal pride of Agamemnon, who has sacrificed his daughter’s life to help on his political schemes, and now brings home with him from Troy the concubine whom he has compelled to share his bed. But there is also the feeling that Clytemnestra is really the better man of the pair: that she is naturally born to rule, and that her subjection to a man would be against the law of nature. Certainly in the play she takes the first place, and Cassandra, a part vocally the most important of any, comes next. The men, Agamemnon, the Watchman, the Herald, Ægisthus, and the helpless chorus of aged councillors, are merely foils to the ‘manlike’ queen. The contrast, indeed, between the resolute woman and the irresolute men in the closing scenes is almost comic, and the play ends with her triumph. In the sequel, The Libation Bearers, the main action is again in the hands of women, Electra and her friends, the maidens of the chorus. Orestes, it is true, does the actual killing; but there is this difference between brother and sister: Electra acts on her own initiative, and is a woman as strong-willed as Clytemnestra herself; Orestes acts only in obedience to the promptings of others. Electra feels no remorse; Orestes, as soon as he has killed his mother, is tormented by imaginary terrors. Among the characters of the second play, by far the most interesting is the old Nurse. She is obviously studied from the life, and is one of the most vivid figures of Greek Drama: her kindly temper and affection for her former charge are contrasted with the fierce bitterness of Electra, and she supplies the one touch of humour that lightens the mournful music of this play.

Last comes the Eumenides, which discusses with almost embarrassing frankness the physical problems of relationship. ‘Is the mother who conceives, or the father who begets the child, the nearer relative?’ And again, ‘Is not the murder of a husband, who is no relation by blood, less heinous than the murder of the mother who brought you into the world?’ These are some of the questions that are raised but not answered, for the final reconciliation satisfies the religious rather than the practical sense. The plot may be put briefly:

A band of women are pursuing a man over the earth; pursuing relentlessly until he shall die of fatigue. Whenever the pursuit slackens, another woman—or rather her spirit—urges on the chase. The man appeals in vain for help from men, and at last a third woman by skilful diplomacy persuades the avengers—or at least some of them—to agree to a reconciliation.

Such is the Æschylean theatre; but, as we have said, Æschylus is a lonely spirit in Athens. The general view of women is represented by the next generation, Pericles, Sophocles, and Thucydides, the greatest statesman, dramatist, and historian of their time. The last of the three is particularly significant. You may read through his History from beginning to end—and if you are a student of affairs you will not find any other book in the world quite so valuable—but, concerning one-half of the human race, you will get scarcely a word. Even in the hortatory speeches, when soldiers are being encouraged to fight for their possessions, women only come in the second place after the children. In the rest of the History they are practically never mentioned.

To Thucydides, women, even such a woman as Aspasia, hardly existed. Politics were to him the serious business, war the great game of life, and in neither of these did women take part. He probably would have agreed with his hero Pericles, ‘a woman’s highest glory is not to fall below the standard of such natural powers as she possesses: that woman is best of whom there is the least talk among men, whether in the way of praise or blame.’

In his indifference the historian faithfully follows the example of the statesman. Pericles, of whose mistress, Aspasia, we hear so much, and of whose wife, the mother of his sons, we hear so little, appears never to have considered the part that nature has assigned to women in the creation and management of a state. In his day Athens was faced by a war that in one year robbed her of many of the bravest of her sons. A state funeral was given them at which, as Thucydides tells us: ‘Any one who wished, stranger or citizen, could be present: even women were there to mourn for their relatives at the grave.’ At the end of the ceremony Pericles made that Funeral Oration in praise of Athens of which echoes are to be found in all contemporary Greek literature. Most of the speech dwells resolutely on the glory of these heroic deaths and the grandeur of the sacrifices made, but at the last the orator condescends to human feeling and addresses some noble words of comfort to the men before him, taking them in succession as fathers, sons, and brothers of the dead. Then comes the one final cold sentence addressed not to the mothers, but to the widows in his audience: ‘a few words of advice,’ Pericles calls it, and it is the language of reproof rather than that of sympathy.

Their ignorance of women made even the greatest minds in Athens insensible to women’s true position, and in the case of Thucydides there is a further reason. When the historian came to compose his work he was too bitterly disillusioned to concern himself with anything but his main subject, the failure of Athens to maintain the Periclean system. In a world where blind chance seemed to rule and the highest political ideals went unrealised, the social position of women may well have seemed to him a trifle.

But Thucydides’ testimony is chiefly negative: we get clearer evidence from Sophocles. Sophocles is the typical Athenian, versatile and ingratiating, ‘eutrapelos, eukolos.’ Actor, poet, priest, and general, he was one of the most popular men of his time—with men. Of his family life we have not quite such a brilliant picture. His wife is one of the many anonymous women, the wives of great men. His children did not apparently regard their father with as much affection as did the outside world, and in his old age tried to deprive him of the control of his property. As to women, and the softer affections of life, outside his own writing we have the anecdote in Plato’s Republic. The poet in his old age was asked how he felt in regard to love: ‘Hush, hush,’ he replied; ‘I have escaped and right gladly. I feel like a slave who has escaped from a mad master.’

That was the feeling which the conditions of life at Athens engendered. Woman and woman’s love was a necessary weakness: happy the man who could break free, and if we believe the stories in Athenæus, Sophocles also in escaping from women fell into the Ionian snare. In his plays women are generally a negligible quantity; at least the only women whom he succeeds in making lifelike are the slave women, the ministering angels like Deianira and Tecmessa who meekly respect their master’s words, ‘oft dinned into their ears’—‘Woman, for women silence is the finest robe.’

Tecmessa, beautiful character though she is, and far superior to Ajax in moral strength, has no independent existence apart from her lord and master. Deianira, deserted by her errant husband, has no thought of resentment: she only wants to get her master back, and is prepared to stoop to any means if she may regain his company. And it is obvious that these two ladies, who would make a modern woman despair, are Sophocles’ ideals of feminine excellence.

Of the other plays, the Œdipus Tyrannus contains only one woman character—Jocasta; the mother married to her own son, a dreadful figure, and one almost impossible to dramatise successfully. In the play she takes only a minor part, and her silent exit is the most effective touch; but it is interesting here to compare Sophocles with Euripides, who in the Phœnician Women does succeed in making Jocasta a real and most pathetic figure. The Œdipus at Colonus has the two girls, Antigone and Ismene, but they are sexless and dramatically only important as types of girlish devotion. The Philoctetes, like the two Œdipus plays, has a male chorus and alone among Greek tragedies, if we except the Rhesus, has no female characters. It is also, whatever the reason, the dullest play we possess.

There remain the Electra and the Antigone, and the first of these is a signal example of the importance for a dramatist of choice of subject. Æschylus and Euripides have both left us plays dealing with the same story, and a comparison with the three tragedies will reveal the essential differences between the three poets. A dramatist must share—imaginatively at least—in his characters’ thoughts; and women like Clytemnestra and Electra were so beyond the range of Sophocles’ experience and sympathy that he is quite unable to make them live. Like everything that Sophocles wrote, the Electra is full of literary accomplishment. The epic method, for example, is most ingeniously adapted to the theatre, and a vivid narrative of the chariot race in which Orestes is supposed to meet his death forms the centre of the play, but there is no real grip on the dramatic situation: it is literature, not life.

In the Antigone, on the other hand, the poet is dealing with a subject thoroughly congenial to his temperament, the conflict between law and the individual, and one independent of sex, and the play is a magnificent example of his art.

Here certainly the central figure is a woman, or, at least, a girl; but the interest does not depend upon her sex, for little dramatic use is made of the Hæmon episode. It is not her sex but her social position that affects the problem of the play, a problem vital enough in itself without any sex interest—‘How far is an individual justified in setting his or her conscience against the law of the State?’

Antigone is a girl orphan, born out of legal wedlock, a slave without a master; and it is a crowning stroke of irony to pit her lonely figure against the majesty of man-made law. To modern readers she seems intensely pathetic, and an Athenian audience would, doubtless, have sympathised with her as a rebel, if not as a woman. There is no word in Greek for ‘to command,’ and their only word for ‘to obey’ means literally ‘to allow oneself to be persuaded,’ so that the conscientious objector was not uncommon. But Sophocles had been a general, and knew by experience the way of Athenian soldiers, and it is not certain that he appreciates his heroine’s wilfulness in quite so favourable a light; for, as we see in his other plays, he was essentially on the side of law. He was rather an observer, with a wonderful command of language, than an original thinker or critic of the established order; and it is a curious turn of fortune for a poet, who had by no means a close or a sympathetic knowledge of woman’s character, that the Antigone, the only play where a woman takes a vital part, should be by far the greatest of his works.

The titles and fragments of his lost plays confirm the impression given by the extant tragedies. We have nearly a hundred names of lost plays, and barely one-fifth are called after women. Moreover, a consideration of the titles of those plays that bear one woman’s name will reveal the fact that the majority were probably rather anti-feminist than feminist. Helen, Eriphylë, Pandora, Procris, Tyro: Helen, who deserted her husband and her home; Eriphylë, who sold her husband for gold; Pandora, the incarnate cause of trouble among men; Procris, bought by a paramour; Tyro, seduced by a second lover: the legends of these ladies were arranged to please the Athenian public. Venal and fickle creatures, they show plainly how necessary it is to keep a close guard over women, and it may be suspected that Sophocles, in his treatment of the plot, did not disappoint the expectations of his audience.

In five plays only is the title taken from the chorus, the Spartan Women, the Lemnian Women, the Water-carriers, the Women of Scyros, and the Captive Women; and it is very unlikely, considering the titles, that any one of the five was written with much sympathy with feminine ideals. ‘Spartan’ and ‘Lemnian’ women were at Athens almost proverbial for ‘unwomanly’ females; a ‘Water-carrier’ was synonymous with a gossip. Of the other two we have a little definite information. Philostratus tells us that the Women of Scyros treated of the not very pleasant tale of the young Achilles, disguised as a girl in the king’s harem, and becoming there the father of Neoptolemus, by the young princess, Deidameia. Of the Captive Women we know that it had the same plot as Euripides’ Trojan Women, but the incidents were treated—humorously. It is not, perhaps, impossible that an author even to-day might regard the troubles of women in war as a fit subject for a jest; but things have advanced so far that we should hardly regard him now as a flawless genius, or hold him up as the highest product of our civilisation.

VII.—Euripides

All Greek literature has one peculiar quality. As the tribe of scholiasts and translators have found from the beginning, it lends itself to interpretation; and Euripides has suffered more than most authors from his interpreters. The ancient belief that Euripides was a misogynist is still sometimes held, and such a misconception is not altogether our own fault. It is partly due to Euripides himself, for the poet’s favourite weapon is irony, and irony is a double-edged sword which can be turned against those who dare to use it. Euripides does not say plainly and straightforwardly ‘You men think yourselves naturally superior to women: braver, more truthful, more unselfish: in reality this superiority is a mere figment of your imagination.’ Neither the poet nor his audience would have cared for such brutal frankness. Euripides exhibits the facts of life, with some little malicious arrangement, and leaves the judgment to others. He is too good an artist, as indeed were Æschylus and Sophocles, to make all his women angels and all his men the reverse. Many of his women have very obvious faults, so that if you come to his plays with a fixed and comfortable conviction of the superiority of man, and can shut your eyes to more than half of the action you will probably find in what remains convincing proof of woman’s weakness.

But often our belief in Euripides’ misogyny has quite another source: our inveterate habit of taking a joke seriously. Aristophanes, who probably knew Euripides—the man and his plays—better than anyone in this world, represents him as a woman-hater in danger from woman’s vengeance. We draw the inference that Euripides did really dislike women.

Now the exact opposite of the truth was what the audience at the performance of an Attic comedy expected. It was allowed, it was considered proper in the case of a comic poet, that he should turn his facts upside down. Socrates, for example, always professed himself unable to teach anything and thought the practice of taking fees for teaching immoral. Therefore, he is represented in the ‘Clouds’ as keeping a school and teaching for hire. Euripides is the champion of woman’s equality; therefore, he is represented by Aristophanes as a misogynist.

There are similar cases in our own social life. An intelligent foreigner, if he read our literature at the time of a general election and took the election posters seriously, would form a very wrong idea of the estimation in which—we will say the Prime Minister—is held by most of his countrymen. A perversion of the facts is even with us regarded as humorous in politics, and it is thus that we should regard Aristophanes. Classical scholars, however, have always been a serious class and while they recognise the grossness of Aristophanes they often fail to see his humour. The irony of Euripides and the humour of Aristophanes are both alien to the Puritan spirit, when they are understood, and to appreciate the first it is necessary to make a close study of all the plays. Euripides was, first of all, a dramatist, and his main business is with his play. But behind the playwright stands the poet and idealist, a man not at all inclined to look on life with philosophic detachment, but feeling, as deeply and as bitterly as any man has ever done, the basis of injustice on which too often human society has been reared.

Euripides championed the cause of woman’s freedom against the decadents of Ionia as he championed the cause of religious freedom against the reactionaries of Delphi. He realised that the best method of defence is to attack the other side: that successful defence is impossible, unless at any rate you are prepared to take the aggressive. Open militancy in his case was impossible, for the dramatic poet was ostensibly a servant of the state and the majority, but by no means all, of his countrymen supported the doctrines of the infallibility of the Delphian god and the Athenian man, so that he is compelled to work in exactly the opposite method to that of the misogynists. He does not labour his argument: he does not paint with a heavy brush. If you like to disregard this point of view you can do so, and still find much that is supremely interesting—his gift of vivid narrative, the light music of his verse, and his unrivalled sense of dramatic effect. But every dramatist, consciously or unconsciously, has some groundwork of thought, some criticism of life, which will appear more or less plainly through the dramatic action of his plays. In Euripides that criticism is directed chiefly to the testing of three assumptions current in his day: that God reveals his purposes to men, that war has an ennobling effect on a nation and on individuals, that women are by nature inferior to men.

With the first two of these dogmas we are not now concerned. As to the real nature of Euripides’ ideas on the third, we shall get the clearest view if we consider first the characters of his theatre, then the general body of his plays, and lastly, those four dramas which are particularly concerned with the relations between men and women.

The two sexes may be sub-divided, according to Greek fashion, into six classes: Old man, man, young man, old woman, woman, young woman; and it must be acknowledged at once that Euripides, like most Greeks, is quite lacking in any reverence for age. His old men are apt to be dotards and are treated with humorous contempt. Amphitryon in the Hercules is a type: he lives in a world of illusion: he sees visions and dreams dreams, but when serious counsel or vigorous action are necessary he is useless. Cadmus and Teiresias in the Bacchæ are characters of the same sort. They are meant to be humorous, and the scene in which the two old men, wagging their hoary heads, prepare to dance and sing is pure burlesque. Cadmus agrees with Amphitryon in his religious views: he is ready to accept the miraculous, if it is profitable; and he scarcely troubles to make any pretence. As regards the divinity of the new god Dionysus, his sentiments are that, as ‘The fellow anyhow is my daughter’s son: it is my duty as head of the family to make out that he is a great god’. Cadmus and Amphitryon are at least partly self-deceived; Ægeus is a mere butt. The old gentleman, who believes that his virility can be restored by magic art, is a child in Medea’s hands, and the scene between the two is Aristophanic in its outspoken frankness.

Generally speaking, old men in Euripides are impotent: when they are allowed to act, their energies—Tyndareus for example, and the old servant in the Ion—are mischievous. In one case only do old men play a worthy part; when they are resisting the wanton violence of some full-grown man who is attacking women and children. Sometimes, as with Peleus and Iolaus, they succeed; sometimes they fail; but in either case their essential weakness is a foil to the presumptuous strength of their opponent.

Coming now to the second class, that of grown men, we get three main types: there is the mean man, the blusterer, and the simpleton. Jason and Admetus are mean men: mean, selfish and cowardly: capable of asking a woman to save their lives at the risk of her own, but incapable of gratitude. Still they are handsome, good company, and quite unconscious of their own shortcomings. Menelaus is a worse type and one that the poet especially disliked. He adds to meanness the vices of cruelty and treachery and is the slave of passion. In the Orestes he is coldly treacherous, in the Andromache treacherous and cruel, in the other plays where he appears merely despicable. Then come the blusterers: Agamemnon and Heracles, Lycus and Eurystheus. The first two are the ordinary sensual man: brave enough and capable of great deeds, but unfaithful, untruthful and self-indulgent: they seem to be strong, and they are strong in body; but they have no strength of mind. Lycus and Eurystheus are men of a lower type, mere bullies depending solely on force, and Euripides does not attempt to make them interesting. Lastly, there are the simpletons: Xuthus, Thoas and Theoclymenus—an easy prey for the clever women—the Priestess, Iphigenia, Helen who use them as they will. They are the men who with advancing age will be such as Ægeus and Amphitryon. And they almost exhaust the list in our second class. There remain only Theseus, a patriotic abstraction, the male counterpart of Athena; Creon, ‘the King’—the name is given to more than one person—an official rather than a living character; and some few persons in the second plan of action: such as the herald Talthybius and the peasant farmer in the Electra. These two latter occupy very subordinate positions, but they are in every way more manly, more generous, more lovable than the great men whom they serve. If we except them, there is not a grown man in the whole theatre of Euripides who can be regarded with sympathy.

When we come to the young men we are in a brighter world. Euripides is essentially the poet of youth, and his younger characters are always lovable. The heroic boy Menœceus and the kind lad Ion are figures drawn with a tender hand. But soon the shadows of the prison house draw in, and the slight hardness which is visible even in Ion becomes intensified in Achilles, and still more in Hippolytus. The older the person, the less attractive he becomes. Achilles and Hippolytus are very much like the public school boy of our day; in many spheres of conduct they are thoroughly reliable: truthful, self-denying and courageous: but they are cruelly hampered by the influence of an environment which shuts out the influence of woman at the most impressionable time of a man’s life. Hippolytus is something of a prig and into his mouth, in the well-known speech, Euripides puts all the stock invective against women. The words are not the lad’s own views: he is too young to have had much experience of women, good or bad: they are literature, the views of other men expressed in books and unconsciously assimilated by the younger generation.

Hippolytus is an ascetic and exaggerates: Achilles is a more manly character. His first impulses are generous, but he does not carry them into effect, for he is too much under the influence of other people’s opinion: ‘good form’ is his guide in life. He has moreover, all a young man’s vanity. ‘Countless girls are setting traps to catch me as husband’ he says; and he is deeply hurt to think that he is not consulted—‘I would have agreed to her death, if I had been asked, but I was not; so I will help you.’ This is the best champion that Clytemnestra can find to save her daughter.

The remaining five characters, men unmarried, but full-grown, are less interesting. Pentheus is the typical ‘self-pleaser’: wilful, violent and intolerant. That he happens to be right in his particular case does not make him more sympathetic nor does it alter the justice of his fate. His mode of thought is wrong. Savage repression is not the way to deal with a cause which enlists women as its chief votaries and is kept active by their enthusiasm. The other pairs, Orestes and Pylades, Eteocles and Polynices, require little notice. All four have the curse of Cain upon them: they draw the sword and fall by the sword. They are murderers first and foremost, and chiefly interesting to the criminologist.

So much then for Euripides’ men. Let us now contrast them in their monotony of type—impute it to the poet or the sex as you will—with the infinite variety of his women: Phædra, Andromache, Hermionë, Creüsa, Megara, Helen, Alcestis, Clytemnestra, Medea. There is every shade of conduct here and nearly every form of marital complication, if we remember that none of these wives are in love with their husbands and that romantic affection between husband and wife is impossible. They are all—when they have children—mothers first and wives afterwards; the childless woman—Hermionë and, apparently, Creüsa—is embittered by her state and her conduct also is abnormal: she is anxious to take life because she has not given life.

The poet is at pains to show the impossibility of married love under Greek conditions. Phædra is married to an old man, who years before had seduced her sister. Andromache has been forcibly taken by the son of the man who slew her first husband. Hermionë has been compelled for political reasons to give up her cousin-lover and marry a stranger. Medea after abandoning everything for her husband is deserted by him. Creüsa has been seduced as a girl and as a ‘pis aller’ has married an elderly man. Megara has been abandoned by her roving husband: she and her children are on the point of being killed by a stranger when Heracles returns and murders them himself. Helen runs away from her lord; Clytemnestra has no words bad enough to use of hers.

None of these women are impeccable—Alcestis is the only flawless character and she is meant to be a saint—their tempers are as composite as we find them in real life; but, however wrong or mistaken some of their actions may be, not one is altogether unsympathetic. So with the old women. They are sometimes malignant, but they are never contemptible. Their worst deeds are prompted by maternal affection. Phædra’s foster-mother is a mischievous and immoral old lady, but her only wish is to gratify her foster child. Hecuba takes a ruthless vengeance on the Thracian king, but she is a mother avenging a murdered son. It is a favourite motive with Euripides; the pathos of the old mother, her sons killed, her daughters ravished, her grandchildren sold into slavery. Hecuba in the Trojan Women, Jocasta in the Phœnician Women, the chorus of old women in the Suppliants: all represent the reverse side of war’s pomp and glory. The men triumph and the women suffer. The method is realistic: there is little romance, in the baser sense of the word, in these unkempt, miserable, old figures, and yet they supply the poet with some of his most poignant passages.

But Euripides is especially successful with his pictures of young girls, virgin martyrs—the type is not extinct—anxious and willing to sacrifice themselves for their male relatives. Iphigenia, Polyxena and Macaria are subtle variations of one character, and upon the figure of the first the poet spends all his skill. At the time of the sacrifice at Aulis she is a sentimental girl, so full of timid modesty that the very thought of marriage fills her with shame. ‘I hid my face,’ she says, ‘in the soft wrappings of my veil and would not take my baby brother in my arms nor kiss my sister on the lips—I felt ashamed before them. No, I laid up for myself many a fond embrace which I would give them when I should come back, a married woman.’ The arguments she uses to her mother to justify her sacrifice are poor enough: vague talk of honour, patriotism and the insignificance of women—’Tis better that one man should live than ten thousand women’; but her heart is right.

For Iphigenia both marriage and sacrifice prove a delusion. She never returns home; she is defrauded of the joy of motherhood, and spends many years of lonely virginity among strangers and in a strange land. When we see her again she is a bitter woman, more sensible, indeed, than the simple girl, but infinitely less lovable. Her thoughts are all of vengeance: against Menelaus, against Helen, against mankind. She performs her horrible task of human sacrifice with no very great reluctance; ‘Parcelling out a tear in sympathy for kindred blood’ when any Greek victims fall into her hands; but killing them all the same. For one person alone she still cherishes some affection, her brother Orestes, whom she had left a baby at home, and on him she concentrates her frustrated motherhood.

The final stage of this rancour against life is seen in the character of Iphigenia’s sister Electra—‘the unwed’—as we have her in the Orestes and the play that bears her name.

Electra’s loneliness and suffering, her long brooding, her craving for revenge have turned her mad: she again has only one sound sentiment, her love for her brother. She is a dreadful figure, but a real one. Fire and the knife: murder, treachery, arson: she is ready for all. Her character is the logical outcome of many years of injuries and insults: of denial of rights and of subjection. She is a proud spirit and will not submit, but her pride cannot alter the situation. At last the strain of hopeless rebellion is too great, and she becomes mad.

They make, indeed, a gloomy picture, these unmarried women, for Euripides does not shrink from the darker side of a woman’s revolt. As Medea bitterly says ‘Even a bad husband is better than none,’ and for the unwedded girl there are only two alternatives, a voluntary sacrifice, such as that whereby Macaria escapes from life, or a hopeless struggle against the powers that be, such as Electra tries to wage.

We have now taken all the characters of the Euripidean theatre, except one, and that one the most important of all—the permanent character of tragedy, the chorus.

The chorus is the ideal spectator, the intermediary between audience and actor, the interpreter of the poet’s own thoughts. It might be expected that a poet who was a feminist at heart would usually have his chorus composed of women, while a poet who had little sympathy with women would prefer a chorus of men. In our extant plays this is exactly what happens. It is a curious fact that most of the received ideas about the Greek drama; the chorus of elders, the statuesque movements, the dignity of tragedy, etc., etc., are drawn from the theatre of Sophocles, the most academic of the three dramatists: they would never be deduced from the usage of Æschylus or Euripides.

In the seven plays of Æschylus, the chorus is composed five times of women, twice only of men. In both cases they are old men, and the weakness of their old age is necessary to the dramatic action. In Sophocles the proportion is exactly reversed. The chorus is five times composed of men, twice of women. Moreover, it is not the dramatic action that fixes either the sex or the age of the chorus in the Œdipus Tyrannus, the Œdipus Colonus, or the Antigone. In the latter play, indeed, most readers will feel that a chorus of women would be more appropriate; the chorus with Sophocles are old men because the old man is the poet’s ideal character.

Of the seventeen plays of Euripides, in only three cases—the Heracles, the Heraclidæ and the Alcestis—is the chorus composed of men. In the first two cases, as in Æschylus, the ineffectiveness of old men in actual danger is part of the plot; the chorus strengthens the impression made by Iolaus and Amphitryon. In the Alcestis, that the chorus are men is part of the general irony of the play.

In the other fourteen plays the chorus is composed of women, and it is into the mouth of these women that Euripides puts all the most intimate part of his work. Sometimes it is a scene of home life as in the Hecuba where a woman describes her last night in Troy.

‘It was at midnight that ruin came. Dinner was over and upon men’s eyes sweet sleep began to spread. All the songs had been sung: my lord had done with the sacrificial feast and its revelry and was lying in my bower, spear on peg, for no longer had he to keep watch against the throng of shipmen who had set foot on our Ilian land of Troy. As for me, one ringlet of hair I had still to bring to order under my tight-bound snood, and I was gazing into the infinite reflections of my golden mirror ere I should throw myself upon the pillows of my bed. But lo! a cry went through the city and a cheer rang out in Troy-town—“Sons of the Greeks—when, ah when, will you sack the watch tower of Ilion and get you home at last?” Then I fled from my dear couch, with only my smock upon me, like some Dorian maid, and crouched by Artemis’ holy shrine. But woe is me, no help found I there. My own man, my bed-fellow, I saw slain before me; and then I was dragged down to the sea shore, and in anguish swooned away.’

Sometimes it is a vivid description of outdoor life, such as the picture of the washing-place, where the humbler sort of women could meet and enjoy a little leisure, ‘that pleasant evil,’ and gossip together. ‘There is a rock that drips, men say, with water from the Ocean’s bed and sends from the cliff an ever-running stream, for us to catch in our pitchers. There I met a friend who was washing pieces of fresh-dyed cloth in the river water and laying them in the warm sun upon the flat stones. From her lips first this news of my lady came to me.’

Every mood of a woman’s mind is represented: now sad—