Another way than once ye ran,
Ye lyric libels, go, and vex
The faithless found, the elder sex.’—(Ion. Verrall’s translation.)
another from the Medea:
‘It is men now that are crafty in counsel, and keep not their pledges by the gods; the scandal will turn and honour come to a woman’s life. ’Tis coming—respect for womankind. No longer will pestilent scandal attack women, and women alone. The music of ancient bards will die away, harping ever on woman’s perfidy. Phœbus is the guide of melody and in my heart he never set the wondrous music of his lyre. Else I would soon have raised a song that would have stayed the brood of male singers. The long years have many a tale to tell, of men as well as of women.’
This last sentence represents Euripides’ reasoned judgment on the problems of feminism. Women are different from men, but they are not inferior: all the arguments that are used to prove woman’s weakness could be used equally well against men.
So we may leave the characters and turn now to the separate plays.
Of the complete dramas that we now possess, the Rhesus is probably spurious, the Cyclops is a comic play, the Helena is a burlesque of the tragic manner. Of the remaining sixteen, two, the Suppliant Women and the Children of Heracles, are political plays, written to glorify Athens as the champion of oppressed nationalities, and their interest is mainly political. But nothing that Euripides wrote is altogether lacking in vivid touches of feminism. In the Children of Heracles, for example, there is one character who in a few words reveals the position of women in Athenian life: ‘For a woman silence and discretion are best, and to remain quiet within doors.’ So speaks the maiden Macaria before she consents to a voluntary death. She has had bitter experience of life and she is willing to die, for existence offers her no very pleasant prospect.
‘A friendless girl—’ she says ‘who will take me for his wife? Who will have children by me? It is better for me to die.’ Her one pathetic desire is to die, not on compulsion but as a willing sacrifice,—to escape from life nobly (the word recurs as often in Euripides as it does in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler), to leave the ignoble servitude of woman’s lot. She begs Iolaus to deal the death-blow and to cover her dead body. But Iolaus, brave old man though he is, cannot bring himself to see her die, and her last request is that at least she may die not among men, but in the arms of women. These are her final words: ‘For my people I die. That is my treasure in death: that I take instead of children and my virgin bloom; if indeed anything exists below. I pray for my part that there be nothing there: if we mortals who must die shall find life’s business in that land also, I know not where to turn. Death is counted the surest potion against pain.’
A similar incident forms the most striking scene of the Suppliant Women. Here it is not a young girl, but a married woman, Evadne, who of her own accord goes to death. But her motive is much the same: ‘for the sake of a noble repute I die,’ she cries ‘that I may surpass all women in generous courage.’ Her husband is dead, she is a childless woman, and she refuses to live on as a widow. Her father is anxious that she should nurse him in his old age, but with strange perversity she prefers death and the old man is left to make lament. ‘My daughter is dead;’ he cries, ‘she who used to draw down my face to her lips and would hold my head fast in her arms. Nothing is so sweet as a daughter when a father grows old. A son’s life is a thing of greater importance, but sons are not so pleasant when we need fond endearments.’