e her brothers,
Polynices and Eteocles, her desire to shield her sister Ismene, her
self-sacrifice for the sake of her brother Polynices, and her filial
devotion to her aged father. Electra also is an ideal type of sisterly
love. Ill-treated by her unnatural mother, abused by the cowardly and
brutal tyrant who had usurped her father's place, only one ray of hope
was left her, that her brother Orestes would return to avenge their
wrongs upon the guilty pair. When the deed is done, and Orestes is
pursued by the Furies, she proves herself a devoted and unselfish
sister. In these two characters we have sublime conceptions of heroic
devotion to duty, but the more human womanly traits have been lost in
the poet's delineation of them as the embodiment of lofty ideals.

Mahaffy finds in these two heroines something hard and masculine, traits
which would not stir the sympathies of the reader or hearer and lead to
emulation. He prefers Sophocles's Deianira and Tecmessa as being "truly
'female women,' as Homer would say, gentle and loving, not above
jealousy, and for that reason a finer and clearer contrast to the heroes
than are the coarser and more dominant heroines." ... "If these
criticisms be just," he adds, "they will show that, in the most perfect
and exclusive Athenian society--that is to say, among Thucydides's and
Sophocles's set, the ideal of female character had degenerated; that to
these men, whose affections were centred on very different objects, the
notion of a true heroine was no longer natural, but was supplanted by a
hard and masculine type. The old free, noble woman, whom AEschylus had,
in early days, still known, was banished from their city life to make
way for the domestic slave of the Attic household, called 'mistress,'
but as such contrasted with the 'companions,' who gradually supplanted
her in Athenian society."

The types of womanhood presented by AEschylus and Sophocles belonged to a
state of society which had passed away, and were too remote from the
life of their own day to be ideals for the daughters of Athens. These
dramatists did not touch upon the problems which were then engaging the
thoughts of enlightened men and women. There is nothing in AEschylus,
absorbed as he was in the problems of destiny, to show that he felt the
many weighty problems that confronted the social life of his time; and
the serene Sophocles gives no hint that the world about him was not the
best of all possible worlds. Bu