Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/286

262 the audience with Phædra on the wave of passion which leads to her murderous slander. It can only be done at the expense of Hippolytus, and it is hard to make a true and generous man do right and be odious for doing so. The long speech of Hippolytus (ll. 616 ff.) manages it. At his exit the spectator is for the moment furious, and goes whole-heartedly with Phædra.

It was in 431, before the Hippolytus, but seven years after the Têlephus,* that Euripides first dealt with the motive of baffled or tragic love, which he afterwards made peculiarly his own. The Medea is, perhaps, the most artistically flawless of his plays; though, oddly enough, it was a failure when first acted. The barbarian princess has been brought from her home by Jason, and then deserted, that he may marry the daughter of the king of Corinth. She feigns resignation; sends to the bride "a gift more beautiful than any now among men, which has come from the fiery palaces of her ancestor the sun." It is really a robe of burning poison. The bride dies in torture. Medea murders her children for the sake of the pain it will be to their father, and flies.

This is the beginning of the wonderful women-studies by which Euripides dazzled and aggrieved his contemporaries. They called him a hater of women; and Aristophanes makes the women of Athens conspire for revenge against him (see p. 288). Of course he was really the reverse. He loved and studied and expressed the women whom the Socratics ignored and Pericles advised to stay in their rooms. Crime, however, is always more striking and palpable than virtue. Heroines like Medea, Phædra, Stheneboia, Aërope, Clytæmestra, perhaps fill the imagination more than