The political aspect of the woman’s question will not detain us for one moment, save to note in passing that it is at least as old as Attic Drama. We have little clue to the political significance, if any, of the many references to the status of women which are to be found in the plays of Euripides; and it does not matter. The broad fact is clear, that the poet was profoundly interested in womanhood: that he had studied feminine character with care and sympathy; and that he felt and strove to reveal something of the evil which must result to the race when the woman is treated unjustly. Hence we have the _Troades_, a drama which looks steadily at the horrors of war from the standpoint of the women who suffer because of it. Hence too, there is an Iphigenia exerting all the energies of an acute mind to rescue her brother from imminent danger; a Medea, transformed from a tender mother into a destroying Fury by Jason’s infidelity; a Phædra literally consumed by love which she will not declare; and an Alcestis, type of enduring feminine courage, placed side by side with the weak amiability of Admetus. The character of Admetus is of some importance in the story we are now to consider, and hence has received a great deal of attention. It has been interpreted variously. On the one hand he is made to appear improbably base, a poltroon who was not only willing that his wife should die in his stead, but who hurried her to the tomb with indecent haste, to avoid the awkward questions of her relatives. On the other hand, he is shown as incredibly virtuous, a man whom the gods delighted to honour—with this doubtful gift of life at another’s cost—and who could not, from very piety, refuse it. But the Admetus of Euripides is not found in either of these two extremes. He is a much more real figure poised somewhere along a middle line between the two; an average man, compounded of good and bad: a warm friend, a tender husband, generously hospitable and of evident charm of nature; but with a fatal weakness of will. Thus, in the common level which the balance shows, he is much more convincing as a man, and for the purpose of the dramatist, an excellent foil to his heroic wife.