ould accuse her to his
father of a crime of which she knew herself innocent. In her despair,
she saw no help but to forestall him by an accusation equally false.

"Medea and Creusa--even Clytemnestra and Hermione--are not portrayed as
transgressors without excuse: in each case, the audience heard the woman
plead her cause and proclaim the doctrine that woman has rights as well
as man, that what man avenges as the inexpiable wrong is not a light
offence against her. It may well be that they were not ripe for the
reception of ideas so unheard-of, that many of them mistook his drift;
but the seed sank in, to bear fruit in due time.

"In each instance the sinner is a woman deeply wronged, or in sore
straits, or under daemoniac influence: there are no such gratuitously
wicked characters as Goneril, Lady Macbeth, or Tamora. Yet no one calls
Shakespeare a misogynist. Why, then, was it possible for Euripides's
enemies to charge him with being one, a charge doubtless echoed by a
good many thoughtless and stupid people in his day, but little
creditable to modern scholarship? For three reasons: first, the wilful
or obtuse misunderstanding of such characters as Phaedra--the
representation of these by Euripides was the main ground on which
Aristophanes alleged that the tendency of his plays was immoral.
Secondly, we occasionally come upon the censures of the faults and
foibles of women--their proneness to scandal, to uncharitable judgments
of their fellows, their pettiness, frivolity, and so forth. It must be
admitted, too, that the context sometimes justifies us in concluding
that the poet is uttering his own sentiments. It was, indeed, to be
expected that a thinker who had so high a conception of what women might
be should be painfully impressed by the contrast presented by what they
too often were. Nor is it matter for wonder that he should take
opportunities of bringing the same feeling home to them. It is not
enough to set noble ideals before people who are not yet conscious of
the incompatibility of their present habits and aims with the emulation
of those ideals. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, as indeed these
were, compared with the hideous presentments of female morality in which
Aristophanes revels, till his readers might imagine that pure and
temperate women were quite the exception in the Athens of his day. And
was he not a friend to women who gave, for the sake of his sisters for
whom heroic ideals might seem set