are the forerunners of the tricksters of the New Comedy—the "fallax servus" of the Menandrian drama. But as respects truth, in the modern import of the word, the morality of the ancients was not that of the moderns. The latter profess to abhor a lie; the former—more prudently and consistently perhaps—made no professions at all on the subject. The crafty Ulysses, rather than the bold Achilles, is the type of an Achæan; Themistocles, far more than Aristides, that of an Athenian Greek. Euripides, who represents men as they are, and not as they ought to be, did not disdain to employ in his plays this common feature of his age and nation, but in none of them has he depicted such a thorough-going scoundrel as the Sophoclean Ulysses in the "Philoctetes."
In what sense of the word was Euripides a hater of women—for that he occasionally spoke ill of them is beyond doubt? His character is indeed a difficult one to interpret—on the surface full of inconsistencies; and seeing these only, it is easy to understand why he was less revered than Æschylus, less esteemed or beloved than Sophocles. Below the surface, however, it is possible to discover a certain unity of purpose in him, and it is traceable in his sentiments on the female sex. First, let the position of women among the Greeks in general be remembered. They lived in almost Oriental seclusion. What was expected from a good wife is shown in a very instructive passage of Xenophon's treatise, 'The Economist or Householder.'
Ischomachus, the principal speaker in the dialogue, describes how he had "trained his wife, at the time he
