CHAPTER VI.
SPECIAL CHARACTERS—HEROINES.
61. It may perhaps surprise the reader that, in approaching the special character drawing of Euripides, we take up female characters first. But whether it be the accident of their preservation, or a peculiar feature in the poet's genius, there can be no doubt that all his greatest portraits are portraits of women. We have reason to think that in some of the lost plays—as, for example, the Philoctetes—there were really great and prominent heroes; but by a peculiar irony of fate, the poet, who was openly reviled in his own day as the hater of women and traducer of their sex, has come down to us as their noblest and most prominent advocate in all Greek literature. We know that the Socratic circle, among other social reforms, desired to improve the condition and education of women, and it is not improbable that Euripides, here as elsewhere one of the new school, contributed his share, with Aspasia, with Socrates, with Plato and Xenophon, to this all-important question. There are no doubt many angry tirades against women in the tragedies; they are commonplace in all Greek literature, and could not be absent from dramatic representations of men and manners. But most of them are spoken in character, by angry or suffering personages, and there is no evidence that they were intended to convey the poet's own bitter experiences. Nor did they at all affect his drawing of female character.
