hless reminiscent
anger, recalls the experience. It had so appalled her, "that bestiality
so beyond all brute-beast imagining," that she would never see again a
play by him who in the crowned achievement of this evening had drawn
himself as Virtue laughingly reproving Vice, and Vice . . . Euripides!
Such a piece it was which had "gained the prize that day we heard the
death."

Yet, musing on that death, her wrath had fallen from her.

"I thought, 'How thoroughly death alters things!
Where is the wrong now, done our dead and great?'"

Euthukles, divining her thought, told her that the mob had repented when
they learnt the news. He had heard them cry: "Honour him!" and "A statue
in the theatre!" and "Bring his body back,[106:1] bury him in
Piraeus--Thucydides shall make his epitaph!"

But she was not moved to sympathy with the general cry.

"Our tribute should not be the same, my friend.
Statue? Within our hearts he stood, he stands!"

and, for his mere mortal body:

"Why, let it fade, mix with the elements
There where it, falling, freed Euripides!"

_She_ knew, that night, a better way to hail his soul's new freedom.
This, by

"Singing, we two, its own song back again
Up to that face from which flowed beauty--face
Now abler to see triumph and take love
Than when it glorified Athenai once."

Yes: they two would read together _Herakles_, the play of which
Euripides himself had given her the tablets, in commemoration of the
Adventure at Syracuse. After that, on her first arrival in Athens, she
had gone to see him, "held the sacred hand of him, and laid it to my
lips"; she had told him "how Alkestis helped," and he, on bidding her
farewell, had given her these tablets, with the stylos pendant from them
still, and given her, too, his own psalterion, that she might, to its
assisting music, "croon the ode bewailing age."

All was prepared for the reading, when (as we earlier learnt) there came
the torch-light and the knocking at their door, and Aristophanes, fresh
from his triumph, entered with the banquet-band, to hail the "house,
friendly to Euripides."

He knew, declared Aristophanes, that the Rhodian hated him most of
mortals, but he would not blench. The others blenched--no word could
they utter, nor one laugh laugh. . . . So he drove them out, and stood
alone confronting

"Statuesque Balaustion pedestalled
On much disapprobation and mistake."