Ibsen, indeed, it is particularly instructive to bear in mind here. According to him “the golden rule is that there is no golden rule”.[839] Dr. Stockman’s nobility consists in telling the truth at all costs. Gregers Werle insists on that course, and is seen to be a meddlesome prig who ruins his friend’s home. Here the Greek and the Norwegian agree heartily; for the “sophistry” with which many at Athens were disgusted is only Euripides’ way of putting his conviction that there is no fixed rule of conduct, still less any fixed rule for our self-satisfied attempts to praise or blame the abnormal. An impulse of pity ruins Creon in the _Medea_; Lycus in the _Heracles_ turns his back on mercy, and is destroyed also. The pride of glorious birth nerves Macaria to heroism; of Achilles it makes merely a pathetic sham. Consciousness of sin wrecks and tortures Phædra, while to Helen in _Orestes_ it means little more than a picturesque melancholy. Hermione in _Andromache_ and Creusa both go to all lengths in their passionate yearning for domestic happiness; one destroys her husband and her own future, the other reaps deeper bliss than she dared to hope. Iphigenia and Hippolytus serve the same goddess, but amid what different atmospheres and diverse destinies! This consciousness that effort brings about results different from its aims, that chance, whatever chance may be, is too potent to allow any faith in orthodox deities, only in moods of despair wrings from the poet such outcry as Hecuba’s, that Fate is “a capering idiot”.[840] But it has planted surely in his mind the conviction that there is no golden rule of conduct. And hence that “love of forensic rhetoric” of which we hear so much—each case must be considered on its own merits.