But the glory of this work is Deianira. A comparison of the _Trachiniæ_ with the _Ajax_ illustrates the development of ideas in the poet’s mind. Tecmessa’s character and position have been analysed, and we find, instead of one woman, two—Iole and Deianira. Iole is mute; it is not her conduct, but her involuntary influence, which contributes to the tragedy. In Deianira, however, we meet the Trojan princess once more, older and with more initiative—tenderer she could not be. It is this union of gentleness with force of mind, of love and sad knowledge of the world, which makes her character so appealing and gracious. A smaller poet would have made her haughty or abject, revengeful or contemptible; Sophocles has portrayed a noble lady, who will bend, but not kneel. Her interview with Iole and the later conversations in which first she excuses her husband and then on reflection finds that she cannot share his home with the newcomer—these scenes, painted with quiet mastery, are the greatest work of Sophocles in the portraiture of women. There can be no doubt that the _Trachiniæ_ is the work of Sophocles; considerations of style, hard to describe but overwhelming, settle the case beyond dispute. None the less we cannot ignore the influence of another school of drama—the Euripidean. The features more or less certainly due to this influence are: (i) The subject itself. Sophocles has studied a woman’s love and its possibilities of unintended mischief in a way which recalls many plots[342] of Euripides. (ii) The “prologue,” especially the explanatory speech of Deianira, is not in the usual manner of the playwright, but quite in that of Euripides. (iii) The last lines, with their reproach against the hardness of the gods who neglect their children, and the total silence about the deification of Heracles, which was the most familiar fact of this story, a silence emphatic throughout, are in spirit Euripidean. (iv) The chorus is almost negligible as a dramatic factor, and one of its songs—the first stasimon—is literally “commonplace”; it would fit any kind of joyous occasion. (v) The turns of expression occasionally recall those of the younger poet. The colloquial ποίαν δόκησιν[343] cannot be paralleled in tragedy except in his work. One line[344] seems borrowed almost without change. Deianira’s homely, almost coarse, words, “and now we two await his embrace beneath one rug,” are not what one expects from the stately Sophocles. The prosaic φαρμακεύς[345] and the allusion[346] to Heracles’ unheroic side (ἡνίκ’ ἦν ᾠνωμένος, “when he was deep in wine”) are on the same level. But most Euripidean of all is the description[347] Deianira gives of her dreadful suitor. There is nothing unlike Sophocles in this acceptance of the legend that Deianira was wooed by a river-god. But the studied nonchalance of the first line “my suitor was a river, Acheloüs that is,” and the absurdity of the second, in which the divine wooer is represented