Page:Measuring Euripides.djvu/17

 Considering that he wrote in democratic Athens, Euripides' plays contain a surprising number of passages extolling Eugeneia or nobility of birth. The chorus in Andromache declare that they had rather not be born at all than not be born of good fathers and well-endowed houses. In several passages nobility is preferred to wealth and in as many more noble marriages are declared the best. Several passages also emphasize the unmistakable character, the indelible stamp which noble birth gives to one. A thought repeated especially often is that the noble should and can bear ills and adversity better than the ordinary man. In the tragedy Helen, however, Menelaus, shipwrecked arid half starved, comes to the conclusion that when a man of high rank falls into adversity he feels it more than those who have long been unfortunate, and in the Phoenician Women, Polynices finds his noble birth of little use when in exile. "High birth," he says, "fed me not."

In a minority of passages nobility by birth does not escape sharp questioning and criticism. In Electra, Orestes complains that "there is no standard of true manliness, for mortal natures are confused. Already I have seen a nobody the son of a noble father and a worthy child from evil parents, and famine in the intellect of a rich man a great mind in a poor body." Later in the same play another character more tersely asserts that many nobles are bad men. In Hippolytus the nobility are charged with having set the common people the example of illicit amours. A half dozen of the fragments make such assertions as that "Noble deeds are better than noble birth" and "Earth gave to all her children the same appearance and we have no distinctive traits of our own, but those of noble birth and of low birth are alike of one race," and "Those whose natures are brave and just, even if they are born of slaves, I call more nobly born than the bearers of empty titles.”

Nothing is more striking in Euripides' plays than the prominent place occupied by women, who both fill leading roles in the cast as individuals and are the subject of incessant comment as a sex. Of the very titles of his eighteen extant plays eight are the names of individual women—Alcestis, Andromache, Electra, Hecuba, Helen, Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia among the Tauri, and Medea—and four others take their names from a chorus of women. As against this only two of Sophocles' seven plays and not one by Aeschylus bear the names of individual women, although four of the Aeschylus' seven plays are named after female choruses, as is one by Sophocles. But for women as an individual personality we have to look especially to Euripides.

In antiquity Euripides gained a reputation as a woman-hater; and a modern critic describes him as "drawing ideal women and yet perpetually sneering at the sex." One of the fragments reads,