Mahaffy finds in these two heroines something hard and masculine, traits which would not stir the sympathies of the reader or hearer and lead to emulation. He prefers Sophocles's Deianira and Tecmessa as being "truly 'female women,' as Homer would say, gentle and loving, not above jealousy, and for that reason a finer and clearer contrast to the heroes than are the coarser and more dominant heroines." ... "If these criticisms be just," he adds, "they will show that, in the most perfect and exclusive Athenian society--that is to say, among Thucydides's and Sophocles's set, the ideal of female character had degenerated; that to these men, whose affections were centred on very different objects, the notion of a true heroine was no longer natural, but was supplanted by a hard and masculine type. The old free, noble woman, whom AEschylus had, in early days, still known, was banished from their city life to make way for the domestic slave of the Attic household, called 'mistress,' but as such contrasted with the 'companions,' who gradually supplanted her in Athenian society." The types of womanhood presented by AEschylus and Sophocles belonged to a state of society which had passed away, and were too remote from the life of their own day to be ideals for the daughters of Athens. These dramatists did not touch upon the problems which were then engaging the thoughts of enlightened men and women. There is nothing in AEschylus, absorbed as he was in the problems of destiny, to show that he felt the many weighty problems that confronted the social life of his time; and the serene Sophocles gives no hint that the world about him was not the best of all possible worlds. But how was it with the sombre and melancholy Euripides? What insight does he give us into the social life of the times?