Dr. Verrall’s[428] theory meets all these difficulties. He supposes that several of Euripides’ plays were originally written for private performance. The _Medea_, so acted, had no obtrusive chorus, and no miraculous escape of the murderess. To the episode of Ægeus corresponded a _finale_ in which Medea, by allowing her husband to bury the bodies of his children, and by instituting the religious rites referred to in our present text,[429] induced both Jason and the Corinthians to allow her safe passage to Athens. This view, or a view essentially resembling it, must be accepted, not so much because of the absurdity involved (as it appears to us) by the presence of the chorus, as the utter futility of the Ægeus-scene in the present state of the text. The characterization shows Euripides at his best. In the heroine he gives us the first and possibly the finest of his marvellous studies in feminine human nature. Alcestis he viewed and described from without; Medea he has imagined from within. Her passionate love, which is so easily perverted by brutality into murderous hate, her pride, will-power, ferocity, and dæmonic energy, are all depicted with flawless mastery and sympathy. Desperate and cruel as this woman shows herself, she is no cold-blooded plotter. Creon has heard of her unguarded threats, and his knowledge wellnigh ruins her project. Her first words to Jason, “thou utter villain,” followed by a complete and appalling indictment of his cynicism[430] and ingratitude, are not calculated to lull suspicion. But however passionate, she owns a splendid intellect. She faces facts[431] and understands her weaknesses. When seeking an advantage, she can hold herself magnificently in hand. The pretended reconciliation with Jason is a scene of weird thrill for the spectators. Her archness in discussing his influence over the young princess is almost hideous; and while she weeps in his arms we remember with sick horror her scornful words after practising successfully the same arts on the king. Above all, there is here no petulant railing at “unjust gods,” or “blind fate”. Her undoing in the past has come from “trust in the words of a man that is a Greek”;[432] her present murderous rage springs from no _Até_ but from her own passion (θυμός). The dramatist has set himself to express human life in terms of humanity.