those of the angelic or devoted type—Alcestis, who died to save her husband, Evadne and Laodamia, who could not survive theirs, and all the great list of virgin-martyrs. But the significant fact is that, like Ibsen, Euripides refuses to idealise any man, and does idealise women. There is one youth-martyr, Menoikeus in the Phœnissæ, but his martyrdom is a masculine business-like performance—he gets rid of his prosaic father by a pretext about travelling-money (ll. 990 ff.)—without that shimmer of loveliness that hangs over the virgins. And again, Euripides will not allow us to dislike even his worst women. No one can help siding with Medea; and many of us love Phædra—even when she has lied an innocent man's life away.
It is a step from this championship of women to the other thing that roused fury against Euripides—his interest in the sex question in all its forms. There are plays based on questions of marriage-breaking, like the Hippolytus and Stheneboia*—in which the heroine acted to Bellerophon as Potiphar's wife to Joseph. There was one, the Chrysippus,* in condemnation of that relation between men and boys which the age regarded as a peccadillo, and which Euripides only allowed to the Cyclops. There was another, the Æolus,* which made a problem out of the old innocent myth of the Wind-god with his twelve sons and twelve daughters married together and living in the isle of the Winds. It is Macareus in this play who makes the famous plea: "What thing is shameful if a man's heart feels it no shame?" But more important than the special dramas is the constant endeavour of this poet to bring his experiences into relation with those of people whom he is trying to understand, especially those of the two
