So much then for Euripides’ men. Let us now contrast them in their monotony of type—impute it to the poet or the sex as you will—with the infinite variety of his women: Phædra, Andromache, Hermionë, Creüsa, Megara, Helen, Alcestis, Clytemnestra, Medea. There is every shade of conduct here and nearly every form of marital complication, if we remember that none of these wives are in love with their husbands and that romantic affection between husband and wife is impossible. They are all—when they have children—mothers first and wives afterwards; the childless woman—Hermionë and, apparently, Creüsa—is embittered by her state and her conduct also is abnormal: she is anxious to take life because she has not given life.
The poet is at pains to show the impossibility of married love under Greek conditions. Phædra is married to an old man, who years before had seduced her sister. Andromache has been forcibly taken by the son of the man who slew her first husband. Hermionë has been compelled for political reasons to give up her cousin-lover and marry a stranger. Medea after abandoning everything for her husband is deserted by him. Creüsa has been seduced as a girl and as a ‘pis aller’ has married an elderly man. Megara has been abandoned by her roving husband: she and her children are on the point of being killed by a stranger when Heracles returns and murders them himself. Helen runs away from her lord; Clytemnestra has no words bad enough to use of hers.
None of these women are impeccable—Alcestis is the only flawless character and she is meant to be a saint—their tempers are as composite as we find them in real life; but, however wrong or mistaken some of their actions may be, not one is altogether unsympathetic. So with the old women. They are sometimes malignant, but they are never contemptible. Their worst deeds are prompted by maternal affection. Phædra’s foster-mother is a mischievous and immoral old lady, but her only wish is to gratify her foster child. Hecuba takes a ruthless vengeance on the Thracian king, but she is a mother avenging a murdered son. It is a favourite motive with Euripides; the pathos of the old mother, her sons killed, her daughters ravished, her grandchildren sold into slavery. Hecuba in the _Trojan Women_, Jocasta in the _Phœnician Women_, the chorus of old women in the _Suppliants_: all represent the reverse side of war’s pomp and glory. The men triumph and the women suffer. The method is realistic: there is little romance, in the baser sense of the word, in these unkempt, miserable, old figures, and yet they supply the poet with some of his most poignant passages.