The problem, however, is too vital to escape his notice, and it forms the central motive of the greatest play in world-literature, the _Agamemnon_. ‘Is a woman ever justified in killing her husband?’ The question had a special interest in Athens, as it must have in any society where women are kept enslaved, for the tyrant always walks in dread of the assassin’s knife. Euripides, with his stinging irony, reveals the secret fear: ‘If women are to be allowed to shed male blood,’ he makes Orestes cry, ‘then we men had better commit suicide at once; if it is a matter only of the will to kill, we may be sure that all women have that already.’ The _Agamemnon_ deals with this problem; the sequel plays with a second question, ‘Is it right for a son to kill his mother in order to avenge his father’s death?’ But the trilogy of the _Oresteia_, besides being concerned with feminist problems, is a living gallery of woman types: Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Electra and the Nurse, the chorus of maidens in the _Choephoroi_, and the chorus of women furies in the _Eumenides_. In the _Agamemnon_ the two women are sharply contrasted; Clytemnestra, the queen who will not submit to man’s rule; Cassandra, the victim predestined by fate to suffer the caprices of a master, and to pass from the treacherous lover, Apollo, to the brutal owner, Agamemnon. No one can read the play and feel much sympathy with the murdered king. He is done to death with every circumstance of horror; returning home after many years’ absence in a foreign land, where he has been fighting for his country, he finds within his house not a faithful wife, but a secret enemy; she conceals her hatred, allures him to the bath, and there, with her own hands, murders him.