There has never been any doubt that Euripidies was interested in the nature, behavior, impact and social status of women. Aristophanes presented him as a notorious hater and slanderer of women. In our present century he is more often seen as one who excites pity for the sufferings inflicted on women by gods and men. He was highly unpopular in his time because of his radical views about the gods and the effect they had on ones destiny. He believed that things were not absolute, but relative. His ideas of women were also very different from the dramatists before him. In an essay by A.W. Gomme, he says, "no literature, no art of any country, in which women are more prominent, more important, more carefully studied, and with more interest, than in the tragedy, sculpture, and painting of fifth-century Athens." (Gomme). Euripides portrayed women in an important...