The particular flaws in the male character with which Euripides deals in the four plays are these—meanness, cowardice, selfishness, and treachery. They are not the faults, it will be noticed, that are especially appropriate to a ruling class. Man is not indicted on the score of haughtiness, pride or cruelty: his weaknesses are of a less ‘manly’ sort. It is his position as the natural lord of creation that is questioned and put to the test of dramatic action.
If Jason, Admetus, Apollo and Menelaus are _impossible_ characters, then Euripides fails altogether in his lesson: if their actions, though possible, are improbable, then again he fails in an artistic sense. Some may think that no one could be quite so mean as Jason, quite so cowardly and selfish as Apollo and Admetus, quite so treacherous as Menelaus; but if we apply the test of experience, the cruel facts of life will justify the poet. None of the four are ‘tragedies,’ in the sense in which we use the word. They are as good examples as we are ever likely to see of ‘la haute comédie’; the Ion and Andromache, perhaps, a little melodramatic, the Alcestis and the Medea in places almost farcical; but all depending eventually on a subtle study of psychology and social relationships.
It is probable that they were not originally composed for public representation in the great theatre of Dionysus. They are intimate studies of humanity and can quite easily be divested of the official chorus, prologue and epilogue, which are independent of the dramatic action of the play. What is left is Euripides’ own teaching, put as plainly as the ironical spirit will allow. The frequency of translation must not blind us to the fact that in essentials Euripides is untranslatable. He is one of the greatest masters of irony and there is nothing that is so apt to vanish in translation, or create confusion in the English mind.
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.