Of the lost plays, many, as far as we may judge by their titles and meagre fragments, have the same characteristic. The most famous, the _Niobe_, had for its central figure the sorrowing mother, such another as Euripides’ Hecuba in the first scene of the _Trojan Women_, and represented perhaps in much the same fashion, for Æschylus, like most Athenian women, knew full well the dramatic value of silence, and the pathos of Niobe’s situation needs no long speeches. So, if we possessed the _Callisto_, the legend of the maiden changed into a bear, the _Penelope_, the _Iphigenia_, or the _Oreithyia_, that favourite Athenian story of the young girl roaming on the sea-shore and carried off by the fierce god to his northern fastness, we should appreciate even more vividly than we can now the romantic side of the tragedian’s art. It is a significant fact in this connection that of the sixty odd titles of lost plays which have come down to us, nearly half are names of women. Moreover, in seventeen of these plays, the title is taken from the chorus, and in the Æschylean Theatre the chorus is generally the central figure in the dramatic action. Such titles as the ‘Daughters of the Sun,’ the ‘Nurses of Dionysus,’ the ‘Daughters of Nereus,’ and the ‘Bacchanal Women,’ suggest at any rate romantic plays with a strong feminine interest; such others as the ‘Women of the Bedchamber,’ the ‘Water-carriers,’ and the ‘Women of Etna,’ might well be examples of that realistic treatment of women’s life of which we have an example in the Nurse of the ‘Libation-bearers.’ Arguments drawn merely from the names of lost plays are obviously of little value, except in so far as they strengthen the definite evidence which the existing tragedies supply, but an examination of the remaining seven plays will show that the first and greatest of Athenian dramatists was deeply impressed with the potentialities for good and evil of the female mind. VI.—ÆSCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES Of the seven plays of Æschylus that remain, three—the _Seven against Thebes_, the _Persians_, and the _Prometheus_—are concerned with battles, and with strife among men and among gods. It might be expected that women here would play but a small part, but, as a matter of fact, in two of the three the chorus, the intermediary between poet and audience, is composed of women, and in the third a woman is the chief character.