ize most
vividly how short this drama falls of being a love-story. She never
even mentions Haemon, has no thought of him, but is entirely absorbed
in the idea of benefiting the spirit of her dead brother by performing
the forbidden funeral rites. As if to remove all doubt on that point,
she furthermore tells us explicitly (lines 904-912) that she would
have never done such a deed, in defiance of the law, to save a husband
or a child, but only for a brother; and why? because she might easily
find another husband, and have new children by him, but another
brother she could never have, as her parents were dead.[303]

WOMAN AND LOVE IN EURIPIDES

Of Euripides it cannot be said, as of his two great predecessors, that
woman plays an insignificant role in his dramas. Most of the nineteen
plays which have come down to us of the ninety-two he wrote are named
after women; and Bulwer-Lytton was quite right when he declared that
"he is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us
_intellectually_ in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes."
But I cannot agree with him when he says that with Euripides commences
"the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment."
There is true sentiment in Euripides, as there is in Sophocles, in the
relations between parents and children, friends, brothers and sisters;
but in the attitude of lovers, or of husband and wife, there is only
sensuality or at most sentimentality; and this sentimentality, or sham
sentiment, does not begin with Euripides, for we have found instances
of it in the fond words of Clytaemnestra regarding the husband she
intended to murder, and did murder, and even in the Homeric Achilles,
whose fine words regarding conjugal love contrast so ludicrously with
his unloving actions. These, however, are mere episodes, while
Euripides has written a whole play which from beginning to end is an
exposition of sentimentality.

The Fates had granted that when the Thessalian King Admetus approached
the ordained end of his life it should be prolonged if another person
voluntarily consented to die in his place. His aged parents had no
heart to "plunge into the darkness of the tomb" for his sake. "It is
not the custom in Greece for fathers to die for children," his father
informs him; while Adinetus indulges in coarse abuse: "By heaven, thou
art the very pattern of cowards, who at thy age, on the borderland of
life, would'st not, nay, could'st not find the heart