These plays were written by men. Just as in {239} the case of Shakespeare they were written by men mainly to be witnessed by men, for while three-fourths of our audiences at theatres now are women, at least three-fourths of the audience in Shakespeare's time were men, and in the old Greek theatre the men largely exceeded the women in attendance. These were masculine pictures of the place of woman, painted not in empty compliment but with profoundest respect and deepest understanding. We honor these writers as the greatest in the history of literature because they saw life so clearly and so truly. Literature is only great when it mirrors life to the nail. What the Greek dramatists had done, Homer had done before them. His picture of the older Greek women shows us that they were on an absolute equality in their households with the men, that not only were they thoroughly respected and loved for themselves, but, to repeat Ruskin, they were looked up to as infallibly wise counsellors, as the best possible advisers to whom a man could go, provided they themselves were of high character and their hearts, as well as their intellects, were interested in the problems involved. There are, of course, in all of the dramatists some wicked women. In the whole round of Shakespeare's characters there are only three wicked women who have degraded their womanhood among the principal figures. These are Lady Macbeth, Regan and Goneril. We have corresponding characters in the Greek dramatists. {240} Clytemnestra is the Lady Macbeth of Greek Tragedy. Euripides, the feminist as he has been called, has shown us, as feminists ever, more of the worst side of women than his greater predecessors AEschylus and Sophocles. He has exhibited the extent to which religious over-enthusiasm can carry women in the "Bacchae," and was the first to introduce the sex problem. In general it may be said, as Ruskin says of Shakespeare, that when a Greek dramatist pictures wicked women "they are at once felt to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in their influence also in proportion to the power for good which they had abandoned." Indeed tragedy, as we see it in the great tragic poets, might be defined as the failure on the part of a good woman to save the men who are nearest and dearest to her from the faults into which their characters impel them. All the great dramatists, ancient and modern, represent women once more in Ruskin's words as "infallibly faithful and wise counsellors--incorruptibly just and pure examples--strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save."