Of Euripides it cannot be said, as of his two great predecessors, that woman plays an insignificant role in his dramas.  Most of the nineteen plays which have come down to us of the ninety-two he wrote are named after women; and Bulwer-Lytton was quite right when he declared that “he is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us intellectually in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes.”  But I cannot agree with him when he says that with Euripides commences “the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment.”  There is true sentiment in Euripides, as there is in Sophocles, in the relations between parents and children, friends, brothers and sisters; but in the attitude of lovers, or of husband and wife, there is only sensuality or at most sentimentality; and this sentimentality, or sham sentiment, does not begin with Euripides, for we have found instances of it in the fond words of Clytaemnestra regarding the husband she intended to murder, and did murder, and even in the Homeric Achilles, whose fine words regarding conjugal love contrast so ludicrously with his unloving actions.  These, however, are mere episodes, while Euripides has written a whole play which from beginning to end is an exposition of sentimentality.

The Fates had granted that when the Thessalian King Admetus approached the ordained end of his life it should be prolonged if another person voluntarily consented to die in his place.  His aged parents had no heart to “plunge into the darkness of the tomb” for his sake.  “It is not the custom in Greece for fathers to die for children,” his father informs him; while Adinetus indulges in coarse abuse:  “By heaven, thou art the very pattern of cowards, who at thy age, on the borderland of life, would’st not, nay, could’st not find the heart to die for thy own son; but ye, my parents, left to this stranger, whom henceforth I shall justly hold e’en as mother and as father too, and none but her.”  This “stranger” is his wife Alcestis, who has volunteered to die for him, exclaiming: 

“Thee I set before myself, and instead of living have ensured thy life, and so I die, though I need not have died for thee, but might have taken for my husband whom I would of the Thessalians, and have had a home blest with royal power; reft of thee, with my children orphans, I cared not to live.”

The world has naively accepted this speech and the sacrifice of Alcestis as belonging to the region of sentiment; but in reality it is nothing more than one of those stories shrewdly invented by selfish men to teach women that the object of their existence is to sacrifice themselves for their husbands.  The king’s father tells us this in so many words:  “By the generous deed she dared, hath she made her life a noble example for all her sex;” adding that “such marriages I declare are gain to man, else to wed is not worth while.”  If these stories, like those manufactured by the Hindoos, were an indication of existing conjugal sentiment, would it be possible that the self-sacrifice was invariably on the woman’s side?  Adinetus would have never dreamt of sacrificing his life for his wife.  He is not even ashamed to have her die for him.  It is true that he has one moment when he fancies his foe deriding him thus: