The Hecuba deals with the same events as the Trojan Women and in the same spirit. The sacrifice of Polyxena is consummated and Hecuba takes vengeance on one of her children’s murderers, the Thracian king Polymnestor. Beguiled into the captive women’s tent he sees his own children murdered and is then blinded. The scene where he comes reeling out with blood-dripping eyes reaches the limits of the horrible, but Euripides does not forget to draw the feminist moral. ‘If any one,’ the king says, ‘has spoken ill of women in the past, or is now in the act of speaking or will some day speak, I will cut all his words short—listen—Neither sea nor land breeds such a race as women are: only the man who has to do with them from time to time knows what they can do.’ The unhappy victim of a single woman forgets his logic and imputes the fault of an individual to the sex. If the aggressor had been a man, his thoughts would have been different and so the chorus tell him. ‘Be not over-fierce against us nor bring the feminine element into your troubles. There is no need to blame all womankind.’ The particular note of realistic horror that marks the closing scenes of the Hecuba appears in another group of four plays, the Iphigenia in Tauris, the Heracles, the Orestes and the Electra. The first three have been exhaustively studied by Dr. Verrall, and it is enough now to say that the methods of criticism which Thucydides and Euripides use upon the Trojan War, are here applied to other tales of the remote and heroic past. Both writers—the historian and the dramatist—know that human nature does not change, and they strip away remorselessly the glamour of ancient legend. If such things happened, _this_ is how they happened, says Euripides; and so we have the half-mad, half-heroic figure of Heracles: the sinister Orestes always ready to unsheath his dagger: the ludicrous yet pitiable Phrygian eunuch stuttering and trembling in panic fear, and most terrible of all the unsexed woman Electra. Each play has its own scene of horror, but the climax, perhaps, comes when Electra takes the head of the murdered Ægisthus in both hands and pours forth all her bitterness into the deaf ears.