t how was it with the sombre and
melancholy Euripides? What insight does he give us into the social life
of the times?

There was a famous saying of Sophocles that "he himself represented men
as they ought to be--Euripides, men as they are." This means that
Euripides, while making the old legends the foundation of his tragedies,
attributed to his heroes and heroines the faults and passions of
ordinary men and women and utilized his plots to present the problems
which confronted society as he knew it. As a follower of Anaxagoras and
a member of the party of philosophers, he was dissatisfied with the
conditions of life about him, and endeavored, through his dramas, to
assist the movements for reform. He was, in many respects, a daring
innovator, and this explains the bitter hostility which Aristophanes,
the ultra-conservative, exhibited toward him. The glaring fault in
Athenian social life was the status of woman, and to the solution of
this problem Euripides bent all his energies. He used woman and the
moral conflicts originating through the relations of the sexes as a
_motif_ for his poetry, and the whole body of his plays is a commentary
on the Woman Question. He found in the portrayal of woman a new field
for his genius, as well as a new means of advocating an unpopular but
righteous cause.

Yet we are confronted by the prevailing opinion that Euripides was a
woman hater who utilized his tragedies to present his unfavorable
opinion of the sex. This view, presented by many modern writers, rests,
however, on false assumptions. To exhibit the low views of woman held by
the men of his day, the poet attributes to certain of his characters
condemnations of the sex as a whole; and these are taken to be
expressions of the personal opinion of the author. Thus Hippolytus
engages in a lengthy tirade beginning:

"Why hast thou given a home beneath the sun,
Zeus, unto woman, specious curse to man?"

[Illustration 232 _PHRYNE After the painting by Henry I. Siemiradsky.
Phryne, with a modesty one would not expect in a woman of her class, was
very careful to keep her beautiful figure concealed, avoiding the public
baths and having her body always enveloped in a long and graceful tunic.
But on two occasions the beauty-loving Greeks had displayed to them the
charms of her person. The fist was at the solemn assembly at Eleusis, on
the feast of the Poseidonia. Having loosened her beautiful hair and let
fall her drapery,