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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,[84] 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, Eriphyl, Pandora, Procris, Tyro: Helen, who deserted her husband and her home; Eriphyl, 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,[85] 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.
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 schylus and Sophocles, to make all his women angels and all his men the reverse. Many of his women have very obvious[87] 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[88] 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[89] 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.
