if he gains anything by marriage; if not, he makes the best of it. If she is a simpleton, that is best. "Deliver me from a clever one!" They plot wickedness with servants. He hates them all. Let some one prove them chaste.
In the tragedies of Euripides the characters often discuss women — evidently the woman question had been rising through the century. In the Hekuba Agamemnon remarks: "I have a contemptuous opinion of the female sex." Iphigenia says, in Iphigenia amongst the Taurians: "A man is a great loss to his family, but a woman is not of much account." Women sympathize with each other and keep each other's secrets loyally. Orestes says that women are clever at inventing tricks, and again, that they have the gift of winning sympathy. In Iphigenia at Aulis the heroine declares that the life of one man is worth that of ten thousand women. In the Hippolytus Phædra says: "I found out thoroughly that I was only a woman, a thing which the world dislikes." In the Andromache Andromache speaks to her maid: "Thou art a woman. Thou canst invent a hundred ways," and again, "No cure has been found for a woman's venom, worse than that of reptiles. We are a curse to man." "Men of sense should never let gossiping women visit their wives, for they work mischief." In the Phœnician Maidens one passage states: "It is the nature of women to love scandal and gossip." In the Medea Medea in soliloquy says to herself: "Thou hast cunning. Women, though by nature little fit for deeds of valor, are expert in mischief," and she exhorts Jason, who is a scoundrel, "Thou shouldst not sink to the level of us poor women, nor meet us with our own childishness." He says that women are weak and given to tears, and that it is natural for a woman to rave against her husband when he is
