It is true that after Iphigenia has made her brave speech declaring that a woman’s life was of no account anyway, and that she had resolved to die voluntarily for the army’s sake, Achilles assumes a different attitude, declaring,

“Some god was bent on blessing me, could I but have won thee for my wife....  But now that I have looked into thy noble nature, I feel still more a fond desire to win thee for my bride,”

and promising to protect her against the whole army.  But what was it in Iphigenia that thus aroused his admiration?  A feminine trait, such as would impress a modern romantic lover?  Not in the least.  He admired her because, like a man, she offered to lay down her life in behalf of the manly virtue of patriotism.  Greek men admired women only in so far as they resembled men; a truth to which I shall recur on another page.

It would be foolish to chide Euripides for not making of this tragedy a story of romantic love; he was a Greek and could not lift himself above his times by a miracle.  To him, as to all his contemporaries, love was not a sentiment, “an illumination of the senses by the soul,” an impulse to noble actions, but a common appetite, apt to become a species of madness, a disease.  His Hippolytus is a study of this disease, unpleasant but striking; it has for its subject the lawless pathologic love of Phaedra for her step-son.  She is “seized with wild desire;” she “pines away in silence, moaning beneath love’s cruel scourge;” she “wastes away on a bed of sickness;” denies herself all food, eager to reach death’s cheerless bourn; a canker wastes her fading charms; she is “stricken by some demon’s curse;” from her eyes the tear-drops stream, and for very shame she turns them away; on her soul “there rests a stain;” she knows that to yield to her “sickly passion” would be “infamous;” yet she cannot suppress her wanton thoughts.  Following the topsy-turvy, unchivalrous custom of the Greek poets, Euripides makes a woman—­“a thing the world detests”—­the victim of this mad passion, opposing to it the coy resistance of a man, a devotee of the chaste Diana.  And at the end he makes Phaedra, before committing suicide, write an infamous letter which, to save her reputation, dooms to a cruel death the innocent victim of her infatuation.

To us, this last touch alone would demonstrate the worldwide difference between lust and love.  But Euripides knows no such difference.  To him there is only one kind of love, and it varies only in being moderate in some cases, excessive in others.  Love is “at once the sweetest and the bitterest thing,” according as it is one or the other of the two.  Phaedra’s nurse deplores her passion, chiefly because of its violence.  The chorus in Medea (627 seqq.) sings: 

“When in excess and past all limits Love doth come, he brings not glory or repute to man; but if the Cyprian queen in moderate might approach, no goddess is so full of charm as she.”

And in Iphigenia at Aulis the chorus declares: