The mother who did mind was regarded as a difficult person, but whether she minded or not, decision lay with the father—as we see in Terence’s play, The Self Tormentor. There the wife says to her husband, ‘You remember, don’t you, when I was pregnant, you told me emphatically that if the child should be a girl you would refuse to rear it.’ The child proved to be a girl, and so without further question it was got rid of. Male children were more valuable, and unless the circumstances of their birth were exceptional, as in the case of Paris and Œdipus, they were not often exposed.
There is this further point: what differentiates killing from murder is the question of risk. You kill, you do not murder, when you risk your own life. A soldier is not a murderer, and in sport a fox-hunter is a man of different type from a pigeon shooter. Now the Athenian women were not Amazons, but they fought a battle no less dangerous. ‘They say of us,’ cries Medea, ‘that we live a life free from danger within doors, while men are fighting like heroes with the spear. But men are fools. Rather would I stand three times in the battle line of shields than bear one child.’ A mother had already risked her life in bringing a child to birth; is she not far more justified than the father in ending that child’s life, if such be her will? Moreover, children are the pledges of marriage, the securities given for a business arrangement. Is it right that the party who wilfully breaks the compact should retain possession of the securities?
Such I believe are some of the questions that Euripides meant to suggest. It is no answer to them to say that it is an unnatural crime for a mother to kill her children, for it is equally unnatural and criminal for a father, and yet ancient fathers killed their children without compunction and without blame.
The Medea then is realistic and little else: the Alcestis, the first in time of Euripides’ plays, is a blend of style, and demands a fuller treatment.
There are no villains in the Alcestis, and there are no heroes. There is one heroic character, but her heroism is of so common a type that it usually passes unnoticed. The three men, Admetus, Pheres and Heracles, in varying degrees are animated by the strongest of all male motives, self-preservation. Alcestis lacks their sound common-sense; she is guided by passion, by the strongest of all female passions and that which comes nearest to the divine, the maternal passion of self-sacrifice. She has given life once, she is prepared to give it again.