dly grants it;
but he has debased his genius. The mob indeed has awarded him the
crowns: is such crowning the true guerdon?

"Tell him, my other poet--where thou walk'st
Some rarer world than e'er Ilissos washed!"

But as to the immortality of either, who shall say? And is even _that_
the question? No: the question is--did both men wish to waft the white
sail of good and beauty on its way? Assuredly. . . . And so she cries at
the last: "Your nature too is kingly"; and this is for her the sole
source of ardour--she "trusts truth's inherent kingliness"; and the
poets are of all men most royal. She never would have dared approach
this poet so:

"But that the other king stands suddenly,
In all the grand investiture of death,
Bowing your knee beside my lowly head
--Equals one moment!
--Now arise and go.
Both have done homage to Euripides!"

But he insists that her defence has been oblique--it has been merely an
attack on himself. She must defend her poet more directly, or
Aristophanes will do no homage. At once she answers that she will, that
she has the best, the only, defence at hand. She will read him the
_Herakles_, read it as, at Syracuse, she spoke the _Alkestis_.

"Accordingly I read the perfect piece."

It ends with the lament of the Chorus for the departure of Herakles:

"The greatest of all our friends of yore
We have lost for evermore!"

and when Balaustion has chanted forth that strophe, there falls a long
silence, on this night of losing a friend.

Aristophanes breaks it musingly. "'Our best friend'--who has been the
best friend to Athens, Euripides or I?" And he answers that it is
himself, for he has done what he knew he _could_ do, and thus has
charmed "the Violet-Crowned"; while Euripides had challenged failure,
and had failed. Euripides, he cries, remembering an instance, has been
like Thamyris of Thrace, who was blinded by the Muses for daring to
contend with them in song; _he_, Aristophanes, "stands heart-whole, no
Thamyris!" He seizes the psalterion--Balaustion must let him use it for
once--and sings the song, from Sophocles, of Thamyris marching to his
doom.

He gives some verses,[117:1] then breaks off in laughter, having, as he
says, "sung content back to himself," since he is _not_ Thamyris, but
Aristophanes. . . . They shall both be pleased with his next play; it
shall be serious, "no word more of the old fun,"