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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. Phdra's foster-mother is a mischievous and[96] 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 Phnician 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[97] 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,[98] 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[99] 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 schylus or Euripides.

In the seven plays of schylus, 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 dipus Tyrannus, the dipus 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 Heraclid and the Alcestis---is the chorus composed of men. In the first two cases, as in schylus, the ineffectiveness of old men in actual danger is part of the plot; the chorus[100] 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[101] 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.'