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VI.] and Phædra, and in the heroines of other lost dramas, burning pictures of passion, he could also draw pure and devoted women, who are hardly inferior to the highest ideals of Christian civilisation. We are not, therefore, surprised that in both conceptions he created permanent types for the stage, and that not only his vindictive but his self-sacrificing heroines have been perpetually revived in modern dramas.

69. When we pass from these first-rate personages to consider his lesser creations, we find a certain poverty which surprises us. Most of them are, in fact, suffering women; who, though they are always intellectually strong and able to argue their case against their opponents, affect us rather by their circumstances than their character. Such are his Andromache (both in the Andromache and the Troades) and his Hecuba, though her savagery—like that of Alcmena at the end of the Heracleidæ—adds an unpleasant trait, which Euripides seems to have found common enough in the old Greek women of his time. Yet his aged Æthra (Supplices) and Jocasta (Phœnissæ) are examples of motherly and sympathetic natures, and show that here too his view was broad and comprehensive. So also the Antigone of the Phœnissæ and the Cassandra of the Troades, though not fully drawn characters, yet attract us—the one by her strong family affections, and the other by the fatal clearness of her prophetic vision, for in both cases these features are the direct cause of their tragic misfortunes.

70. Four only remain, which may here receive more special notice; two of them—Creusa and the Tauric Iphigenia—heroines of circumstance, the other two—Electra and Clytemnestra—heroines of character also. It happens that three of these, each occurring in separate plays, are drawn on consistent lines; but I must impress on the reader that this is an accident. The Greek tragic poets did not attach a fixed character to each hero or heroine who recurred constantly in