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energetic policy of Athens, of her readiness to champion the cause of the weak, than that uttered in the appeal of Aithra in the Suppliants, and in the speeches and chorus-chants in the Children of Herakles. He consistently denounced the practices of the demagogues who would mislead her, he pointed to the sources of her truest strength, he vindicated her free institutions, he recalled her heroic past. It was fitting that to him who in life so passionately loved Athens, who sang his soul out in praise of her beauty and her glory, it should be vouchsafed to plead from his grave for her, and plead not in vain.

Attitude to woman.But Euripides rendered not only to his country, but to all Greece, a yet higher, because a more enduring service, and one whose effects went deeper into the national character. The reader has doubtless been struck with the fact that, though Admetus in the play of Alcestis stands justified by the public opinion of the drama, and by the audience, he yet reproaches himself in words even bitterer than the venomous tongue of Pheres had found. Why? Because Euripides was not in heart at one with his countrymen with respect to the character, capabilities, and rights of woman; and here for the first time he strikes the new note. It was his glory to have introduced and to have developed a new and higher conception of woman. Lovely, gentle, noble, devoted women had indeed been depicted in epic poetry; but, ideal as these might be in beauty, their place in the heroic age and in a state of society which had passed away with the epoch of the despots made them too remote from the daughters of his own day to be ideals for them. The position of woman had, in fact, become in the Attic age degraded from the older type. In the city-life of the republic women of the higher classes were no longer permitted the old freedom, nor honoured with the same trust; nor were