credit of good women, or more delicately or tenderly delineated female characters. For this assertion it is sufficient to cite Polyxena in his "Hecuba," Macaria in "The Children of Hercules," Evadne in "The Suppliant Women," the sisterly devotion of Electra in his "Orestes," Iphigenia in both of the plays bearing her name, and the sublime self-sacrifice of the noble and loving Alcestis. Even Hecuba and Jocasta are braver and wiser than the men about them, and these old, afflicted, and discrowned queens have neither youth nor personal charms to recommend them. Phædra he represents not as a vicious woman, but as the helpless victim of an irate deity; while in the "Medea" the fierce and revengeful heroine has all our sympathy, while Jason has all our contempt.[1]
And if Euripides were reprehensible for his opinions on women, what shall we say of his antagonist Aristophanes? Had the wives and daughters of Athens no cause of complaint against their caricaturist? If the pictures drawn of them in his "Lysistrata" and "Thesmophoriazusæ" be not wholly fanciful, what woman sketched by Euripides would not be too good for such profligate companions? The female characters
- ↑ Adolph Schöll, the author of an excellent Life of Sophocles, reminds his readers that the very female characters which Euripides is sometimes taxed with selecting, because they were particularly wicked, for his themes, were brought on the stage by Sophocles in dramas now lost—e.g., Phædra, Sthenebœa, Ino, Medea often, Ærope, Althæa, Eriphyle, &c. &c.; and he notices also that Euripides, in many of his dramas, atoned, if there was any occasion to do so, for his portraits of the bad, by his numerous delineations of good women.
