But Thucydides’ testimony is chiefly negative: we get clearer evidence from Sophocles. Sophocles is the typical Athenian, versatile and ingratiating, ‘_eutrapelos, eukolos_.’ Actor, poet, priest, and general, he was one of the most popular men of his time—_with men_. Of his family life we have not quite such a brilliant picture. His wife is one of the many anonymous women, the wives of great men. His children did not apparently regard their father with as much affection as did the outside world, and in his old age tried to deprive him of the control of his property. As to women, and the softer affections of life, outside his own writing we have the anecdote in Plato’s _Republic_. The poet in his old age was asked how he felt in regard to love: ‘Hush, hush,’ he replied; ‘I have escaped and right gladly. I feel like a slave who has escaped from a mad master.’ That was the feeling which the conditions of life at Athens engendered. Woman and woman’s love was a necessary weakness: happy the man who could break free, and if we believe the stories in Athenæus, Sophocles also in escaping from women fell into the Ionian snare. In his plays women are generally a negligible quantity; at least the only women whom he succeeds in making lifelike are the slave women, the ministering angels like Deianira and Tecmessa who meekly respect their master’s words, ‘oft dinned into their ears’—‘Woman, for women silence is the finest robe.’ Tecmessa, beautiful character though she is, and far superior to Ajax in moral strength, has no independent existence apart from her lord and master. Deianira, deserted by her errant husband, has no thought of resentment: she only wants to get her master back, and is prepared to stoop to any means if she may regain his company. And it is obvious that these two ladies, who would make a modern woman despair, are Sophocles’ ideals of feminine excellence. Of the other plays, the _Œdipus Tyrannus_ contains only one woman character—Jocasta; the mother married to her own son, a dreadful figure, and one almost impossible to dramatise successfully. In the play she takes only a minor part, and her silent exit is the most effective touch; but it is interesting here to compare Sophocles with Euripides, who in the _Phœnician Women_ does succeed in making Jocasta a real and most pathetic figure. The _Œdipus at Colonus_ has the two girls, Antigone and Ismene, but they are sexless and dramatically only important as types of girlish devotion. The _Philoctetes_, like the two Œdipus plays, has a male chorus and alone among Greek tragedies, if we except the _Rhesus_, has no female characters. It is also, whatever the reason, the dullest play we possess.