Another shade of the same virtue gives a peculiar attraction to the self-devotion of Alcestis in her death, and of Electra in her attendance on the brain-sick Orestes. Blending with the despair of the captive princess and the frenzy of the inspired Pythia, this sublime unselfishness renders Cassandra's attitude in the _Troades_ heroically tragic. She goes, a bondwoman, an unwilling concubine, with Agamemnon to Mycenæ. Insult and slavery and a horrible death, clearly discerned by her prophetic vision, are before her. And yet she triumphs gloriously; her voice rings like a clarion when she proclaims that the guerdon of her suffering is the ruin of the house of Atreus. It is noticeable that Euripides, the so-called woman-hater, has alone of the Greek poets subsequent to Homer, with the single exception of Sophocles, devoted his genius to the delineation of female characters. It is impossible to weigh occasional sententious sarcasms against such careful studies of heroic virtue in woman as the Iphigenia, the Electra, the Polyxena, the Alcestis of our poet. Aristophanes, who was himself the worst enemy Athenian ladies ever met with, describes Euripides as a foe to women, apparently because he thought fit to treat them, not as automata, but as active, passionate, and powerful agents in the play of human life.[8] But to return to our illustrations of #eupsychia#. In the _Medea_ and the _Hippolytus_ Euripides again displays this virtue of stern stoicism in two women. But here the heroines are guilty: their Spartan endurance of anguish to the death is tempered with crime. These tragedies are the masterpieces of the poet; in each of them the single passion of an individual forms the subject of the drama. Separated from all antecedents of ancestral doom, Medea and Phædra work out the dreadful consequences of their own tempestuous will. Not _Othello_, and not _Faust_, have a more complete internal unity of motive. No modern play has an equal external harmony of form. Medea was one of the most romantic figures of Greek story. Daughter of the sun-god in the Colchian land of mystery and magic, she unfolded like some poisonous flower, gorgeous to look upon, with flaunting petals and intoxicating scent, but deadly. Terrible indeed in wiles, she learned to love Jason. By a series of crimes, in which the hero participated as her accomplice, and of which he reaped the benefits--by the betrayal of her father's trust, by the murder of her brother, by the butchery of Pelias--she placed her lover on the throne of Thessaly. Then Jason, at the height of his prosperity, forgetting the love, as of some tigress, that the sorceress bore him, forgetting, too, her fatal power of life and death, cast his eyes on Glauke, the king's daughter of Corinth, and bade Medea go forth with her sons, a pariah--a dishonored wife. Whither should she turn? To Colchis, and the father whose son she slew? To Thessaly, where the friends of Pelias still live? Jason does not care.