Among the dithyrambic writers, Licymnius tells the story of the treachery of Nanis, but the sort of legends which seem to interest him more are those of Hypnus and Endymion, Hymenaeus and Argynnus, and the like. The same was perhaps true of Cydias. But one interesting figure these writers do supply; that is the Cyclops of Philoxenus. A good deal has been written about this “romantic” conception, and it has been generally considered as a proof of how strongly the romantic feeling must have been already developed that it was possible to represent Polyphemus as in love with Galatea. Those who have considered what has already been said may perhaps be tempted to come to a somewhat different conclusion. The barbarous and boorish Polyphemus spends his time in singing of his love to Galatea, because no one who was not a barbarian and a boor would be such a fool as to waste so much time about a woman. This view spoils the idyllic charm of the picture rather, perhaps, but it may be the true one for all that.[66]

In the foregoing examination of the remains of the lyric writers, it was always necessary to regard, not only the date of each writer, but also the country to which he belonged; for, as we have already had occasion to notice, the social position of women differed widely in different parts of Greece, and this fact could not fail to be, to a certain extent, reflected in such literature as dealt with them.

In examining the work of the tragedians, this necessity will no longer be present. Early Greek tragedy is entirely under the influence of Athens. The only tragedians whose works have been to any considerable extent preserved were Athenians; and such fragments of the non-Athenian dramatists as have survived do not in any way lead one to suppose that their work was in any essential characteristic different from that of their Athenian contemporaries.

At Athens the social position of women was, on the whole, a very low one, and consequently the relations between men and women were not on a particularly high level. The men cared very little either for or about the women, and there is nothing therefore surprising in the generally admitted fact that the love-element as between the sexes plays but a very unimportant part in the early tragedians. Aeschylus seems well-nigh to have ignored it; in Sophocles it played a prominent part in but two, or at most three tragedies;[67] even in Euripides the proportion of plays in which love of any sort supplies the main interest is very small.[68]

But one question may very naturally be asked. Assuming that the way of regarding women at Athens rendered it difficult or impossible to interest an Athenian audience with a love-story, as between man and woman, why should not the tragedians have made more use of the many stories that told of the love of men for men? If, it may be argued, this form of love was really so important an element in the life of the time, if it really occupied that place in the hearts of men as a whole that is now occupied by the love of women, why did Aeschylus and Sophocles only devote a couple of plays between them to its treatment?[69] Sophocles, at any rate, ought to have understood all about it.

The answer is probably to be found in the fact that the passion of love, in any shape or form, is foreign to the true spirit of Greek tragedy. The taste of the Greeks, refined in this as in most other things, considered love as essentially unfitted for the stage. That two people should stand up and make love to one another with a crowd looking on was, to the Greek mind, essentially unfitting. Love was an emotion which concerned individuals; it was an emotion which ought to be controlled in public, and only find expression in private.

The whole history of Greek poetry is so much commentary on this one fact. The love-poems of Sappho or Anacreon, just like the later love-poems of Asclepiades or Poseidippus, were meant to be sung by a single singer to a small and select audience. In the choral poetry, which required a number of performers, and was listened to by a large audience, the personal love-element is well-nigh non-existent. The attempt of Ibycus to introduce it, and his failure to find imitators, we have already noticed.

And in the choral poetry sung in honour of Dionysus, from which tragedy had its rise, it is obvious, when one considers the intimate connection between the rites of Dionysus and Artemis, and the ascetic principle underlying their worship, how especially out of place a love-element would have been.

The fact, therefore, that love as between man and man does not play any very prominent part in the early tragedies, must simply be explained by the Greek dislike to the public display of violent private emotions. It took a long time to overcome this old-fashioned prejudice, and establish the love-element as an integral part of tragedy; and it is not uninstructive to observe how the movement began. The earliest love-story admitted on the Greek stage was the story of Achilles and Patroclus.[70]

But before entering upon the more detailed examination of the relations between the sexes, as illustrated by the Attic tragedians, it is necessary once more to call attention to, and warn against, a very fertile source of confusion.

It is above all things necessary that the reader should carefully distinguish between two very different things, two very different ways of regarding women, which are not uncommonly confused—woman as an object of interest, and woman as an object of love. As objects of interest, we find the female characters of the tragedians steadily developing throughout the fifth century; as objects of love, we do not find them develop at all. The relations between women and men are, in reality, as far from the modern in the last plays of Euripides as in the first of Aeschylus. Towards the close of the century, a very considerable proportion of the tragedies concern themselves with studies of female character in its various phases; the power of women for good and evil (especially the latter) is very generally acknowledged; their passions and their emotions are carefully analysed and elaborately discussed; and yet in all this analysis and discussion the love-element, in any modern sense of the word, plays no part whatever. By this time, woman at Athens held an important place in the mind of man; as yet she held no place in his heart at all. From end to end of the three great tragedians, there can hardly a single passage be quoted which so much as suggests the possibility of an unselfish and unsensual attachment between man and woman, playing at all an important part in the life of either; and this important fact it will be the object of the following pages to make clear.

Aeschylus, as has been said often enough, never brought on the stage a woman “in love.”[71] That he should never have brought on the stage a man in such a condition went of course without saying; even Euripides was never accused of that. Indeed, Aeschylus’ characters do not think much of women at all. That girls should not misbehave, if left to themselves, even their own father finds it hard to believe;[72] that in any sort of difficulty they should be a hindrance rather than a help, is only what one would expect.[73] Women are certainly not worth fighting about;[74] what really acquits Orestes is the fact that, after all, it was only a woman he killed.[75]

An apparent exception to all this is of course Clytemnestra. Why should Aeschylus, having so poor an opinion of women, have given so prominent a place to Clytemnestra in the murder of Agamemnon? The answer is doubtless to be found in the very significant fact that between Homer and Aeschylus the story had been treated by Stesichorus, to whom the prominence of Clytemnestra was beyond all reasonable doubt due.[76]

Aeschylus, then, has little enough to say about women; but in Sophocles there is fortunately somewhat more to be found; indeed, it is probably the female characters of Sophocles that are most generally appreciated by modern readers. And yet, for all the great part played by women in the Sophoclean drama, the part played by women’s love is wonderfully small.

Take a woman like Deianira; the man who can listen to her without feeling a positive shock must be more in sympathy with Athens than I ever wish to be.

She guesses the truth from Lichas about Heracles and Iole (Trach. 436), and begs him to tell her all, for she is no coward, nor yet is she the sort of woman who would refuse to admit a husband’s right to an occasional infidelity.

“Love is irresistible,” she says; “if I were to blame my husband or this woman for falling victims to it, I should be a fool. Do not be afraid to tell me all. Has not Heracles often done this sort of thing before without making me jealous? Why should he make me jealous now? And as for the woman, why, I can only pity her, when I see how her beauty has made her lose her home and her home comforts, for which, expertae crede, the love of Heracles is hardly a sufficient compensation.”

When this is Sophocles’ ideal wife, one can hardly wonder that Haemon owes the only word of sympathy he gets from his Antigone to the editors.[78]

But even Deianira has her human moments, and in one of these she utters that wonderful lament of hers for the joys of her lost maidenhood, and the sorrows of her married life (Trach. 144 seqq.), a passage which may well be compared with one from the Tereus. (Fr. 524, Nauck). Both these dwell sympathetically on the slavery of married life, and almost make one think at first sight that the poet must have felt what a mockery his “ideal wife” really was. But a little further examination will show clearly enough that Sophocles is not expressing his own views in either of these two passages. The protest in the Tereus is merely the direct outcome of the decidedly exceptional circumstances in which Procne finds herself—a woman who has just cooked her only son is hardly likely to have unprejudiced views on matrimony—and as such it is not meant to be more than one of those outcries against irresistible destiny, which one may pity if one likes, or even pardon, but which one cannot pretend to treat seriously. For a girl to complain of having to marry was as reasonable as for a man to complain of having to die.

As for the passage from the Trachiniae, that seems to be simply an echo from Sappho, and Sappho’s views on marriage were naturally different from those of Sophocles.[79]

To suppose from these passages that Sophocles saw anything inappropriate in the existing conditions of married life, or that he would have welcomed any change in them, is an unjustifiable inference.[80]

But the one play of Sophocles which is generally considered to be of supreme importance for this particular subject is the Phaedra. This play, which is supposed to have been the model for the Hippolytus of Euripides, is generally looked upon as the first “love-tragedy” of the Greeks. But was it a “love-tragedy” at all, in any sense in which the words are now understood? To judge by analogy, there is every reason to suppose that it was not.

The fragments unfortunately prove little, for no very important ones are preserved, and the one or two of them that do speak of love, merely speak of it in the regular Sophoclean way, not as a human passion, but as an unavoidable kind of disease, something like measles or distemper.[81]

But in spite of the paucity of the fragments, the main principle on which the legend (of which we have already spoken)[82] was treated, is sufficiently clear; and this principle is such as is, I venture to submit, incompatible with the presence in the play of any real love-element.

Phaedra’s love is not passion but madness, it is not an emotion but a disease. Aphrodite treats her in exactly the same way as Athene treats Ajax. Her love is so entirely outside her control, it is so entirely the result of external influences, that while one can perhaps pity her, one certainly cannot sympathise with her, for the simple reason that her misfortune is entirely outside human experience. She loves Hippolytus, as Oedipus kills Laius, for no earthly reason except that the story said the god made her do so. The Phaedra of Sophocles, like the Clytemnestra of Aeschylus, is made an instrument of divine vengeance for reasons which do not concern her personally in the least; one pities her, not as an unhappy lover, but as the victim of fate. She is no longer a human being influenced by human emotions; she is simply a tool in the hands of a relentless deity. In other words, she is never in love with Hippolytus at all, in any commonly-accepted sense of the term.

And thus it must be sufficiently clear to anyone who is able to get rid of preconceived ideas on the matter, that the Phaedra was in reality no more “romantic” than the Trachiniae or the Antigone. Like the rest of the plays of Sophocles, it merely drew the usual picture of the gods playing shove-halfpenny with human souls; the fact that Aphrodite for once took a hand in the game gave it on this occasion a peculiar character of its own, but of anything in any way resembling a modern love-element there is no more trace here than there is anywhere else.[83]

But what really affords a more conclusive proof than any other of how utterly anything of the nature of modern love between man and woman was unknown to Sophocles, is the remarkable prominence given in his plays to the affection between brother and sister.[84] The relations between Electra and Orestes, or Antigone and Polynices, are absolutely those of modern lovers; but Sophocles could not conceive of such relations as existing between people whom he would have called “lovers,” and, therefore, he had to think of the parties to them as brother and sister. He wished to draw a picture of pure, noble, and unselfish devotion existing between man and woman; the only conditions under which such a thing seemed to him possible were that the man and the woman should be close blood relations.

There are those who complain of the indifference of Electra to Pylades, or of Antigone to Haemon, and think that a little love infused into these heroines would make them more human. These people have overlooked the fact that Electra and Antigone are in reality quite as much in love as ever woman was; but they are in love with their brothers. They did not know it perhaps; Sophocles did not know it; but the fact remains. Antigone despises love—what she and her audience thought was love. Between Polynices and Haemon there is never a moment’s hesitation; almost her last words are an exclamation of the bitterest contempt for marriage: “If my husband had died, I could have married another; if he had failed to get me children, I could have committed adultery; but—my brother is dead!”[85]

And yet, Antigone comes far nearer to a modern lover than Phaedra ever does.

This is a fact of the greatest importance in the present connection, and one that cannot be too much emphasised. The relation of the sexes was such among the early Greeks that a pure love between man and woman seemed to them a sheer impossibility, and yet their instinct told them that pure love was not really an impossible thing. The ways in which the difficulty was surmounted were various. Of the love of man for man and of woman for woman we have already spoken; in Sophocles a third alternative is suggested. The lovers are made man and woman, but the possibility of sensuality is first removed by making them brother and sister. A woman who loves a man may love him purely, says Sophocles, if she is in such a position that she cannot love him otherwise.[86]

In the first two of the Athenian dramatists there are then, as we have seen, practically no traces whatever to be found of a love-element in any real sense of the term. But this, it may be said, is nothing wonderful. This everyone will admit. For the love-element one looks to Euripides. In the following examination of Euripides, I hope to show that not only is love, in any modern sense, quite unknown to his characters, but also that the whole “romantic” element of his plays, on which it is the custom to lay such stress, is much less pronounced than is generally supposed; in other words, that his men take really very little interest in his women.

But before discussing what Euripides did not do, it is well to have a clear conception of what he did do; for he did do a great deal. The great service of Euripides to art was that he emphasised unmistakably the importance of women. He seems to have been the first emphatically to enunciate that doctrine of cherchez la femme, which has been the groundwork of all modern art. He was not the first man to discover it; the men who made the story of Troy knew it as well as he did; but he was the first, as far as we know, consciously to adopt it as an artistic canon. He was the first deliberately to maintain that the highest artistic effects were to be obtained by the contrast of the sexes. The women of the earlier tragedians, as far as they are of any interest, are merely women, as it were by accident; they are men in everything but their dress. The women of Euripides, however unpleasant they may be, are always intensely feminine. The emphasis which Euripides laid on the feminine as opposed to the masculine element is at once his chief characteristic and his chief merit.

The ways in which he emphasises the importance of women are various. Everyone knows the stress he lays on their power of doing harm; the “misogyny” of Euripides need hardly be illustrated here.[87] At the same time, he is fully aware of their power for good.[88] He dwells on their cleverness repeatedly: “If supremacy were a matter of brains, and not of brute force, men would not have a chance.”[89] He is convinced of their heroism: Iphigeneia goes to her death with far more dignity than Antigone. He is even convinced, in a way that not all his successors have been, of their reasonableness: there are few men who could discuss their own deaths as calmly and clearly as Phaedra[90] or Polyxena.[91] It would be easy to multiply instances if there were any need to do so.

All this Euripides did. He made his women powerful, intelligent, heroic, reasonable. He did not make them loved or loveable. In this Euripides is well-nigh as old-fashioned as any of his predecessors. In all the extant plays there is not a single instance of a man in love with a woman; there is no evidence, except perhaps in one isolated case,[92] of such a character in any of the plays that have been lost. So far from Euripides being the poet of love between man and woman, there are numerous situations in his plays where it seems simply extraordinary to the modern reader how such obvious opportunities for the introduction of such love can have been missed or ignored.[93]

A detailed examination of some of the plays will bring this out clearly; but before proceeding to this, it would be well to observe certain of the more general features of the Euripidean conception of the relations, other than social and intellectual, existing between men and women.

The first point to be noticed is that Euripides, too, just like Sophocles, speaks of love as a sort of irresistible madness or disease,[94] which seizes on its victims without any particular reason, and can only be cured or borne by being allowed to have free course. It is, as I have said before, exactly like measles; the only proper treatment is to help it as much as you can to “come out,” as then it is less painful at the time, and less likely to have serious consequences. Instances of this view are sufficiently numerous. It forms the chief framework of the Hippolytus, and all attempts to interpret the emotions of that play in accordance with more modern notions, are without success. The same was still more the case in the Phoenix, as Suidas distinctly implies by his use of the words τῷ υἱῷ ἐπέμηνε τὴν παλλακήν in this connection.[95] It is enunciated by Jason to Medea in the Medea (526 seqq.) as a proof that he owes nothing to her, as she was not responsible for her actions in saving him; by Helen to Menelaus in the Troades (945 seqq.) as a perfect excuse for her conduct with Paris.

Now it is just here, one may as well notice at once, that the difference between Euripides and modern writers, with the Alexandrians at their head, is so striking. The lovers in Euripides, as far as they are lovers at all, are carried along by a forcible external impulse, the direction of which is entirely sensual and entirely selfish. If, or as soon as, they fail in achieving the gratification of their sensual desires, their “love” immediately turns to hate. The idea of devotion or self-sacrifice for the good of the loved person, as distinct from one’s own, is absolutely unknown. “Love is irresistible,” they say, and, in obedience to its commands, they sit down to reckon how they can satisfy themselves, at no matter what cost to the objects of their passion.

Love is irresistible still, one knows, as irresistible now as ever it was in Greece, but the impulse it gives has a different direction. To put it perfectly crudely, the Euripidean woman who “falls in love” (it is of women we are speaking now) thinks first of all, “How can I seduce the man I love?” The modern woman thinks, “How can I die for him?” This is the difference between ancient and modern love, and in Euripides the old is still untouched by the new.[96]

It is this sensual, this well-nigh mechanical view of love which makes possible that conception of the ideal wife, of which we have already spoken in the case of Sophocles’ Deianira, and which is so strongly insisted upon in the Andromache of Euripides.

Andromache regularly appears as the model wife, not only in the play which bears her name, but also in the Troades. Her views on married life have, therefore, a peculiar weight of their own.

she explains to the youthful Hermione.[97] “Now the greatest of these virtues is, to be content with your husband and not to be jealous. You are jealous of me. What would you do, supposing you were married to a Thracian king with twenty wives instead of only two? You would murder them all, I suppose, in your jealousy, showing thereby how utterly unbridled was your lust. I was never jealous; I used to act as foster-mother to Hector’s illegitimate children.

“But you, you are afraid to let a drop of rain fall on your husband’s head.

φιλανδρία![98]

This is not irony; it is just sober earnest, the sober earnest morality of respectable Athens. The view is by no means confined to Andromache. It is deliberately propounded by Electra to her mother,[99] and Jason twice taunts Medea with her failure to live up to its level.[100] Indeed, it may be said to colour, to a certain extent, the whole conception of married life. For a woman to wish to keep her husband to herself was a sign that she was at once unreasonable and lascivious.

This doctrine of the absolute subjection of the wife[101] is emphasised in various ways. That a really respectable wife not only always stays at home, but also never sees visitors, is more or less of an axiom.[102] To give a woman her head is dangerous in the last degree, and if you do, you will probably get murdered for your pains.[103] Suicide for a husband’s sake is only respectable on the part of a woman,[104] for her husband is her life.[105]

But where is one to find such a model wife? for marriage is such a lottery that one ought really to be allowed, if one can afford it, to have several tickets, in case the first doesn’t turn out well.[106] The only chance is to marry a woman of good family; in other words, the only thing worth marrying for is rank.[107] To prefer to marry for love is not only foolish, but unfair on one’s children.[108]

It is this view of married life, this devotion to an ideal of drudgery on the part of the woman, and the calm acceptance of such devotion as a matter of course on the part of the man, which explains such a play as the Alcestis.[109] The woman is devoted to the man, not because he is himself, but because he is her husband. For the man she does not care in the least, but for the husband—for the ideal of the family—she is perfectly ready to die. It is this which at once makes the story of Alcestis possible, and robs it of half its pathos. Had Alcestis loved Admetus as a man, she could not but have felt the bitterest disappointment at his accepting her offer. As it is, she seems to regard his conduct almost as much as a matter of course as he does.[110]

The brief examination of one further point in the Euripidean view of women may serve as introduction to the more detailed discussion of the romantic element in his plays, or, rather, of its absence. Euripides speaks frequently as if there were a sort of freemasonry existing among women, which makes one woman always ready to side with another as against a man. Instances of this are common, especially in the relations between the heroine and the Chorus, when the latter, as mostly in Euripides, consists of women.

Thus Medea, when asking the Chorus not to reveal her plans, says—

Similar in spirit is a line from the Alope (Fr. 108):

or l. 329 of the Helen:

In this same play, too, Menelaus decides that his wife is the proper person to go and ask help of Theonoe:

A “romantic” writer might have thought that the prayers of Menelaus himself would have been more effectual with a lady.[111]

The most important of the extant plays of Euripides is, for the student of the development of the romantic tendency, undoubtedly the Hippolytus. But, in thinking of this play, the reader must first of all guard against a very common and, for a modern, very natural mistake. He must remember that the interest of the piece is intended to centre, not on Phaedra, but on Hippolytus. The main interest of the plot is the struggle between asceticism and self-gratification, as personified in the maiden Artemis and the sensual Aphrodite.[112] Phaedra is only made to fall in love with Hippolytus in order that he may reject her advances, and thereby irritate her into working his ruin. As has already been pointed out, she is dragged into a quarrel which does not concern her, for a purpose which does not interest her personally in the least.[113]

Bearing this in mind, the reader will be able to understand that combination of passionate desire and cold-blooded reasoning which marks the utterances of Phaedra. She has come to the conclusion, she says at last (l. 391 seqq.), that love is an irresistible disease; and since her position as a married woman makes impossible the only means of cure with which she is acquainted, she decides that, for the sake of her husband and children, she had better die. She will never dishonour her children, for, next to money, there is nothing so valuable as a good name.

To this the Nurse replies (l. 433 seqq.) that of course love is irresistible, and there is only one way to cure it; but she points out that this way may perfectly well be adopted. The fact that Phaedra is married need not be any obstacle, for husbands are used to seeing more than they say.

“Leave the matter to me, and if women can’t effect a cure, perhaps men can.”

Phaedra protests. The Nurse answers with a little very natural impatience (l. 490)

Phaedra admits this, but insists that it would be more respectable to die. The Nurse, however, persuades her to try a love-potion first, and with this excuse leaves her to look for Hippolytus. Hippolytus, as one knows, rejects the Nurse’s proposals, and Phaedra takes refuge in suicide, making, as she dies, one last desperate attempt to save her own good name at the expense of the man she is supposed to love (l. 715).

This, then, is the story of Phaedra. Where in all this is there a trace of what we now call love? Where is there a single expression of affection for Hippolytus, a single expression to show that she thinks of him otherwise than of one who has done her a great and irretrievable injury? She seems to think of him as one would think of a man from whom one had caught the cholera. “Love is all bitterness,” she says (l. 349); “and he is the cause.” The catastrophe comes, and she walks off quietly to murder him,

If this is love, the world must be a poorer place than I gave it credit for.

Then follows the great argument between Hippolytus and his father, which to the Athenians was doubtless the chief point of the play. On the speech of Theseus we need not dwell, though it is perhaps just worth noticing the way in which he enunciates, as a sort of great discovery which his own experience and observation have enabled him to make, the theory that it is possible for the initiative in a criminal liaison to come from the side of the man (l. 966 seqq.).

The answer of Hippolytus, however, is well worth study. For the first 24 of his 52 lines he describes in general terms his own blameless character, and it is only at the 25th that he condescends to discuss the particular incident. “But you do not perhaps believe all this about my chastity,” he says (l. 1007); “but do tell me, then, what was the temptation in this particular instance? Was this woman’s body so especially beautiful? (1½ lines.) Or did I wish by my conduct to become your heir? (2½ lines.) Or to become king? (3 lines.) Surely you know my only interest is in athletics.” (5 lines.) Then, having finished the arguments which he is able to bring forward, he proceeds to swear, and so concludes. In other words, in a speech of 52 lines, the suggestion that he might have been in love with Phaedra, even in the most rudimentary sense of the words, is contemptuously dismissed in a line and a half, and no one seems to think that this part of the subject ought to have been treated at greater length. Now this one fact seems to me in itself almost a sufficient proof that “romantic” ideas, even as they were understood at the end of the fourth century, were utterly foreign to Euripides.[114]

To come to another play. There are probably few things in all literature so strange, not to say comic, to modern ideas, as the relations between Achilles and Iphigeneia in the Iphigeneia in Aulis.

Clytemnestra has been trapped into bringing her daughter to Aulis, on promise of marriage with Achilles, and when, in the scene which begins at l. 801, she discovers the truth, she appeals to him for protection. Achilles, “the nearest approach to a modern gentleman of all the Greek tragic characters,”[115] replies as follows (l. 919 seqq.):

“I am a person of the highest breeding, and therefore you may trust me to give you the correct answer under the circumstances. Your daughter, having been betrothed to me, shall not be killed; it would reflect discredit on me if she were, and that I cannot permit. No one shall so much as touch the hem of her garment. It is not, of course, for her sake that I undertake to do this, but because I consider that Agamemnon has treated me shamefully. He used my name to trap you into coming here without asking my consent; of course I should have allowed him to use it if he had asked me, for I always put patriotism before everything; but he did not ask me. I feel grossly insulted, and he will touch Iphigeneia at his peril.”

“Your sentiments, Achilles,” remarks the Chorus, “are worthy alike of you and of your divine descent.”

“How can I thank you enough,” replies Clytemnestra, “for all the trouble you have promised to take in this matter, which cannot interest you personally in the least?”

There is a moment’s pause; then she suggests timidly, “But would you like the girl to come to you herself?”

“God forbid!” exclaims Achilles with horror. “How can you suggest anything so improper?” Then after a little he adds, “You must first of all go and argue the case with Agamemnon.”

“Why that?” asks Clytemnestra. “There is no chance there.”

“Perhaps not,” he answers, “but still I wish you to try; for I should very much prefer, if possible, that my name should be kept out of the business altogether.”

“What you say does you credit,” she answers. “I will do my best to obey you.”

For the modern reader who studies this scene, and then leans back and thinks a little what he would have done or thought in Achilles’ place, comment is, I imagine, superfluous.[116]

Or look at Andromache’s speech in the Andromache. (l. 184 seqq.) She is accused of occupying too high a place in the favour of Neoptolemus. “Tell me,” she answers to Hermione, “what reason could I possibly have for wishing to stand well with your husband? Do I wish to reign in your place, or to have more children, or to make my children kings? Or what reason could he possibly have for preferring me? Is my native city so powerful? Have I such influential friends?” &c. &c. As in the Hippolytus, the idea that there may be love on either side is dismissed without discussion.

Or look at the character of the Autourgos in the Electra. He has married Electra, but refuses to touch her, and why?