[4] Very notable in this respect is his consistent degradation of Ulysses.
[5] Exception must be made in favor of the Hippolytus and the Bacchæ, where the whole action of the play and the conduct of the persons are determined by the influences of Aphrodite and Dionysus. The same exception, but for other reasons, may be made in favor of the Ion.
[6] Hecuba, for example, in her play; Electra in hers; Menelaus in the Helena.
[7] It may be questioned whether a Dorian type of character was not in the mind of Euripides when he constructed his ideal of feminine heroism. What Plutarch in the life of Cleomenes says of Cratesiclea and the wife of Panteus reads like a commentary on the tragedies of Macaria, Polyxena, and Iphigenia. Xenophon's partiality for the Spartans indicates the same current of sympathy. Philosophical analysis was leading up to an eclectic Hellenism, yet the Euripidean study of Hermione seems intended as a satire on the Lacedæmonian women.
[8] The real cause of offence was the prominence given by Euripides to the passion of unholy love in some of his heroines; to the interest and sympathy he created for Phædra, Sthenobœa, and others.
[9] The whole of this splendid speech should be compared with the fragment of Neophron's Medea, on which it is obviously modelled. See, below, the chapter on the Tragic Fragments.
[10] Notice especially the speech of Orestes, line 367.
[11] Goethe was very severe on the critics who could not appreciate Euripides: "To feel and respect a great personality, one must be something one's self. All those who denied the sublime to Euripides were either poor wretches incapable of comprehending such sublimity, or shameless charlatans, who, by their presumption, wished to make more of themselves, and really did make more of themselves, than they were" (Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe, English ed., vol. ii. p. 377). In another place he indicates the spirit in which any adverse criticism of Euripides should be attempted: "A poet whom Socrates called his friend, whom Aristotle lauded, whom Menander admired, and for whom Sophocles and the city of Athens put on mourning on hearing of his death, must certainly have been something. If a modern man like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees" (ib., vol. i. p. 378). Again (ib., vol. i. p. 260), he energetically combats the opinion that Euripides had caused the decline of Greek tragedy.