"Why should we worry our heads over womankind? For when we keep them well they make us more trouble than when we pay no attention to them." Euripides himself, however, at any rate, could not keep from paying attention to them. He does contain a number of diatribes against the sex and woman is more than once pronounced "the worst" and even "the fiercest evil of all," far exceeding the waves of the sea or flames or dire poverty.
Where we possess the context, however, we generally find that these sweeping invectives against the sex as a whole are occasioned by some evil suffered at the hands of a woman. But other passages assert that there are good women as well as bad and that the whole sex should not be included in one reproach. Women may be both the greatest help and the worst ill for a man. says one fragment, and another affirms that, while there is nothing worse than a bad woman, there is absolutely nothing better than a good woman. "I hate the entire female kind except the mother who bore me," says a third fragment but the very next fragment in Nauck's edition rebuts this by asserting, "Male censure idly shoots an empty bow at women in speaking ill of them, but I say that they are better than males." It is not alone to male censure that women are subjected on Euripides' page, however; he more than once puts condemnation of their sex in their own mouths. They also, however complain that their lot is harder than that of the men and that men do not themselves live up to the moral standards which they lay down for women.
One of the longest diatribes against woman is that of the youth Hippolytus when the nurse, having wormed the secret of her mistress's unlawful love for her stepson from her, proceeds without the consent of her mistress to tempt Hippolytus to gratify that love. The modest boy, full of filial feeling towards his father, is moved with horror and moral indignation at the servant's evil suggestion. "O Zeus!" he cries, "why did you create woman." Why cannot men be procreated in some other way? He wishes that babies might be bought at temples and that men might live at home free from women. How great an evil woman is, is clear from the fact that her father has to give a dowry to get rid of her, and that her husband wastes his wealth in adorning her. And that he either marries an uncongenial wife for her family connections or has to put up with the bad relatives of a good wife. Hippolytus goes on to declare that it is best to have some simple nobody as a wife and that he hates a wise woman. He hopes that he may never have a wife who thinks more than a woman should. Clever women are all the more mischievous. And no servant, but only beasts who bite and cannot speak, should be allowed near women. After these rambling reflections, which strike the modern reader as rather ludicrous and out of keeping with their tragic context,—a type of incongruity, however, of which
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