Note 68 — Women in Greek Poetry

Among the extant plays there is only the Hippolytus, and even in this, probably to the Greek mind a great part of the interest centred in the relations between Hippolytus and Theseus, and in their argument, where both start from the assumption that it would be absurd to suppose that the former could possibly have been in love with Phaedra. Of the lost plays it is hard to speak with confidence, but certainly the Andromeda, Phoenix, and Aeolus, seem to have been the only three in which the love element was at all the leading motive. The heroine of the Meleager was probably Althaea, not Atalanta. The Stheneboea merely describes the vengeance of Bellerophon for the treachery of his hosts. In the Antigone the “love-story” has all taken place before the action begins. Of the Alcestis and the Protesilaus we shall speak elsewhere, pp. 57, 99.