ven by the strange pain of these that
die.]--Cf. the attitude of Artemis at the end of the _Hippolytus_.
Sometimes Euripides introduces gods whose peace is not riven, but then
they are always hateful. (Cf. Aphrodite in the _Hippolytus_, Dionysus in
the _Bacchae_, Athena in the _Trojan Women_.)

P. 82, l. 1336, O faithful unto death.]--This is the last word we hear of
Electra, and it is interesting. With all her unlovely qualities it remains
true that she was faithful--faithful to the dead and the absent, and to
what she looked upon as a fearful duty.

* * * * *

Additional Note on the presence of the Argive women during the plot
against the King and Queen. (Cf. especially p. 19, l. 272, These women
hear us.)--It would seem to us almost mad to speak so freely before the
women. But one must observe: 1. Stasis, or civil enmity, ran very high in
Greece, and these women were of the party that hated Aegisthus. 2. There
runs all through Euripides a very strong conception of the cohesiveness of
women, their secretiveness, and their faithfulness to one another. Medea,
Iphigenia, and Creusa, for instance, trust their women friends with
secrets involving life and death, and the secrets are kept. On the other
hand, when a man--Xuthus in the _Ion_--tells the Chorus women a secret,
they promptly and with great courage betray him. Aristophanes leaves the
same impression; and so do many incidents in Greek history. Cf. the
murders plotted by the Athenian women (Hdt. v. 87), and both by and
against the Lemnian women (Hdt. vi. 138). The subject is a large one, but
I would observe: 1. Athenian women were kept as a rule very much together,
and apart from men. 2. At the time of the great invasions the women of a
community must often have been of different race from the men; and this
may have started a tradition of behaviour. 3. Members of a subject (or
disaffected) nation have generally this cohesiveness: in Ireland, Poland,
and parts of Turkey the details of a political crime will, it is said, be
known to a whole country side, but not a whisper come to the authorities.

Of course the mere mechanical fact that the Chorus had to be present on
the stage counts for something. It saved the dramatist trouble to make his
heroine confide in the Chorus. But I do not think Euripides would have
used this situation so often unless it had seemed to him both true to life
and dramatically interesting.

End of the