All four plays are concerned with problems of motherhood and children, especially male children. In three, child-actors are required and play an important part in the action: the fourth play, the Ion, has for its hero a lad, just emerging from the ‘awkward age’ of boyhood. Between the Ion and the Andromache there is a curious resemblance of plot. The case was probably not uncommon in the circumstances of race-degeneration that prevailed at Athens during the fifth century. In both plays a husband has a childless wife, but a son by an irregular union. There are two women to one man, and in each case there is another man in the background, Apollo who has seduced Creüsa, and Orestes who has been the affianced lover to Hermionë. The husbands, Xuthus and Pyrrhus, are the least important figures in the action; indeed, Pyrrhus does not appear in person at all. They are represented as colourless characters; men of position and personal courage, dangerous, perhaps, when roused, but generally negligible. Their young wives, Hermionë and Creüsa, regard them with a mixture of contemptuous fear and jealous affection. The interest is concentrated on the women, and the plays are studies of wifely jealousy—‘Why should my husband have a child, while I am childless?’—and maternal love. Euripides knows well that motherhood is a woman’s natural sphere: a childless woman is for him an abnormal woman, and behaves in an abnormal and anti-social fashion. Both wives attribute their barrenness, probably the natural result of their past history, to supernatural causes. Hermionë believes that the foreign concubine Andromache has bewitched her: Creüsa, that she has incurred the anger of a god. Hermionë accordingly proposes to break the spell by killing the witch; Creüsa goes to Delphi to propitiate the divinity and seek his aid. Both women, also, in their jealous hate are anxious to kill their husband’s bastard. Hermionë uses her father’s help and nearly succeeds in murdering the boy Molossus. Creüsa employs her father’s old slave as her agent, and all but poisons the boy Ion. In neither case is the crime accomplished, for the plays are not ‘tragedies’; but the criminal purpose is there. The women have been injured in the past and they are childless. They are embittered against life and ready to requite evil for evil. On the other hand, the unwedded mothers in both plays are ready to sacrifice themselves for their children. Andromache offers her life to save her son—‘What pleasure have I in life?’ she cries, ‘In him all my hopes centre: it would be a disgrace for me not to die on behalf of the child I bore. Children, indeed, are life: those who in ignorance disparage them, may feel less pain than we do, but they are miserable in their happiness.’