“And for its women to be dragged away captives, alas! alas! both the young and the aged, like horses by their hair, while their vestments are rent about their persons.  And the emptied city cries aloud, while its booty is wasted amid confused clamors....  And the cries of children at the breast all bloody resound, and there is rapine, sister of pell-mell confusion ...  And young female slaves have new sorrows ... so that they hope for life’s gloomy close to come, a guardian against these all-mournful sorrows.”

For women of rank alone is there any consideration—­so long as they are not among the captives; yet even queens are not honored as women, but only as queens, that is, as the mothers or wives of kings.  In The Persians the Chorus salutes Atossa in terms every one of which emphasizes this point:  “O queen, supreme of Persia’s deep-waisted matrons, aged mother of Xerxes, hail to thee! spouse to Darius, consort of the Persians, god and mother of a god thou art,” while Clytaemnestra is saluted by the chorus in Agamemnon in these words:  “I have came revering thy majesty, Clytaemnestra; for it is right to honor the consort of a chieftain hero, when the monarch’s throne has been left empty.”

We read in these plays of such unsympathetic things as a “man-detesting host of Amazons;” of fifty virgins fleeing from incestuous wedlock and all but one of them cutting their husbands’ throats at night with a sword; of the folly of marrying out of one’s own rank.  In all Aeschylus there is on the other hand only one noticeable reference to a genuine womanly quality—­the injunction of Danaus to his daughters to honor modesty more than life while they are travelling among covetous men; an admonition much needed, since, as Danaus adds—­characterizing the coarseness and lack of chivalry of the men—­violence is sure to threaten them everywhere, “and on the fair-formed beauty of virgins everyone that passes by sends forth a melting dart from his eyes, overcome by desire.”  Masculine coarseness and lack of chivalry are also revealed in such abuse of woman as Aeschylus—­in the favorite Greek manner, puts in the mouth of Eteocles: 

“O ye abominations of the wise.  Neither in woes nor in welcome prosperity may I be associated with woman-kind; for when woman prevails, her audacity is more than one can live with; and when affrighted she is still a greater mischief to her home and city.”

WOMAN AND LOVE IN SOPHOCLES

Unlike his predecessor, Sophocles did not hesitate, it seems, to bring “a woman in love” on the stage.  Not, it is true, in any one of the seven plays which alone remain of the one hundred and twenty-three he is said to have written.  But there are in existence some fragments of his Phaedra, which Rohde (31) and others are inclined to look on as the “first tragedy of love.”  It has, however, nothing to do with what we know as either