‘Children, promise of children’s children to be, Children to help their sorrow, to make more sweet their pleasure, To speak with their enemy! Rather, I say, than gold, than a palace of pride, Give me children at home, right heritors of my blood. Let the miser plead for the childless side: I will none of it. Wealth denied, Children given, I bless them and cleave to the better good’ —(_Ion. Verrall’s translation._)
A strange and wondrous thing for women are the children they bear in travail. Womankind loves a baby.—(_Phoenissae._)
All the questions of sex are considered and judged with clearest sense.
‘Man’s love when it is excessive is neither excellent nor, indeed, creditable. But still, sex is a divine thing and a gracious, if kept within bounds. A moderate temper, for that I pray: avaunt, contentious anger and the ceaseless bickering that drives a husband astray to another woman’s arms.’—(_Medea._)
Sometimes the question takes a wider range as in the difficult chorus of the Iphigenia in Aulis.
‘The stuff of which men and women are made is different: their ways are different too. But what is really good, of that there is no doubt. The different methods of rearing and education have a great influence on ideas of excellence. Humble modesty is a form of wisdom; and yet it is wondrous good to use your own judgment and see your duty for yourself. Then life is honourable and your frame grows not old. It is a great thing to seek after excellence. For us women the quest is secret down the secret ways of love; for men the marshalled state and the thronging crowd make a city to increase and prosper.’
But the topic on which Euripides insists most is the scandal of literature, the unfair ideas of woman that have been created and fostered by the perversity of writers. Two quotations will suffice. One from the Ion:—
‘Ye scandal-masters of the lyre, That harping still upon the lust Of losel women never tire, Her lewdness ever, now be just. How doth her faith superior show Beside the lust of losel man! See it, and change your music. Go Another way than once ye ran, Ye lyric libels, go, and vex The faithless found, the elder sex.’—(_Ion. Verrall’s translation._)
‘It is men now that are crafty in counsel, and keep not their pledges by the gods; the scandal will turn and honour come to a woman’s life. ’Tis coming—respect for womankind. No longer will pestilent scandal attack women, and women alone. The music of ancient bards will die away, harping ever on woman’s perfidy. Phœbus is the guide of melody and in my heart he never set the wondrous music of his lyre. Else I would soon have raised a song that would have stayed the brood of male singers. The long years have many a tale to tell, of men as well as of women.’