Such is the view to be gleaned from history, and in Mahaffy's opinion the literature of the time tells the same story. He goes on: "When we consult the literature of the day, we find women treated either with contemptuous ridicule in comedy, or with still more contemptuous silence in history. In tragedy or in the social theories of the philosophers alone can we hope for a glimpse into the average character and position of Athenian women. Here at least we might have expected that the portraits drawn with such consummate skill by Homer would have been easily transferred to the Athenian stage. But to our astonishment we find the higher social feelings toward women so weak that the Athenian tragic poets seem quite unable to appreciate, or even to understand, the more delicate features in Homeric characters. They are painted so coarsely and ignorantly by Euripides that we should never recognize them but for their names. Base motives and unseemly wrangling take the place of chivalrous honor and graceful politeness. "But the critics of the day complained that Euripides degraded the ideal character of tragedy by painting human nature as he found it: in fact as it was, and not as it ought to be. Let us turn, then, to Sophokles, who painted the most ideal women which the imagination of a refined Athenian could conceive, and consider his most celebrated characters, his Antigone and his Elektra. A calm, dispassionate survey will, I think, pronounce them harsh and masculine. They act rightly, no doubt, and even nobly, but they do it in the most disagreeable way. Except in their external circumstances they differ in no respect from men." Certainly, the opinion expressed of the women of Euripides is tainted by the feeling that they ought to act like English matrons and their daughters. Quite a different impression is given by Symonds, who, in regard to some of the sentences occurring in Euripides which are uncomplimentary to women, says: "It is impossible to weigh occasional sententious sarcasms against such careful studies of heroic virtue in women as the Iphigenia, the Elektra, the Polyxena, the Alkestis."