For the early part of this brilliant period we must rely on the ideal pictures of tragedy for the higher side, and the ribald travesties of comedy for the lower side of feminine life, AEschylus flourished just before and during the glorious period following the Persian War,--the good days before the influx of foreigners and the new education corrupted the life and undermined the faith of the citizens. In his seven extant plays he has presented to us only three feminine characters of any importance,--Clytemnestra, Electra, and Cassandra,--all belonging to the cycle of tragedies treating of the fate of King Agamemnon and his royal house at Mycenae. The dramatist's pictures of home life show his high conception of the ability and the importance of women and of the large part they play in human history. His Clytemnestra is a ruling queen exercising all the functions of royalty, but her powerful nature has been debased by grief and sin. She identifies herself with the "ancient bitter Alastor," who visits on Agamemnon the curse of his house. She is self-sufficingness, adamantine purpose, studied craft, and cold disdain incarnate. With fulsome speech and consummate flattery she welcomes her husband home; and when the deed is done and he lies dead by her hand, in exultant tones she rejoices in the blood upon her robe as "a cornfield in the dews of spring." Truly she is the most powerful portrait of feminine guilt that dramatic literature affords us. AEschylus drew his scenery and his characters largely from the conditions of the Heroic Age as pictured by Homer, and was little affected by the current of everyday life about him. As AEschylus has given us Clytemnestra for an ideal type of feminine power and wickedness, so Sophocles has presented two immortal heroines, Antigone and Electra, who are statuesque in the beauty and grandeur of their characters. In Antigone we observe two fundamental qualities,--enthusiasm in the performance of duty, and intensity of domestic affection, as seen in her efforts to reconcile her brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, her desire to shield her sister Ismene, her self-sacrifice for the sake of her brother Polynices, and her filial devotion to her aged father. Electra also is an ideal type of sisterly love. Ill-treated by her unnatural mother, abused by the cowardly and brutal tyrant who had usurped her father's place, only one ray of hope was left her, that her brother Orestes would return to avenge their wrongs upon the guilty pair. When the deed is done, and Orestes is pursued by the Furies, she proves herself a devoted and unselfish sister. In these two characters we have sublime conceptions of heroic devotion to duty, but the more human womanly traits have been lost in the poet's delineation of them as the embodiment of lofty ideals.