Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/420

383 in which he exhibited Œneus, Têlephus, Thyestês, Inô, and other heroic characters, were unmercifully derided, though it seems that their position and circumstances had always been painfully melancholy; but the effeminate pathos which Euripidês brought so nakedly into the foreground, was accounted unworthy of the majesty of a legendary hero. And he incurred still greater obloquy on another point, on which he is allowed even by hie enemies to have only reproduced in substance the preëxisting tales,—the illicit and fatal passion depicted in several of his female characters, such as Phædra and Sthenobrca. His opponents admitted that these stories were true, but contended that they ought to be kept back and not produced upon the stage, a proof both of the continued mythical faith and of the more sensitive ethical criticism of his age. The marriage of the six