to Greece. The story as it stands is a common ballad motive and not calculated to disturb any one. But the disciple of the sophists did not leave these romances where he found them. He liked to think them out in terms of real life. The songs in which Aëropê poured out her love were remembered against Euripides after his death. It was all very well to sympathize in a remote artistic way with these erring damsels; but Euripides seemed to come too near raising an actual doubt whether the damsel had done anything so very wrong at all, that respectable people should want to murder her. Euripides is, as a matter of fact, not loose but highly austere in his moral tone. But next to religion itself, the sphere of sexual conduct has always been the great field for irrational taboos and savage punishments, and the sophists naturally marked it as a battle-field. The kings of Egypt commonly married their sisters, and did so on religious grounds: to a Greek such marriage was an unspeakable sin. There is a problem here, and Euripides raised it sharply in a play, Aeolus, based on the old fairy-tale of the King of the winds who dwells as a patriarch on his floating island with his twelve sons married to his twelve
