for "death defends,"
and moreover, Balaustion has delivered her admonition so soundly! Thus
he departs, in all friendliness:

"Farewell, brave couple! Next year, welcome me!"

It is "next year," and Balaustion and Euthukles are fleeing across the
water to Rhodes from Athens. This year has seen the death of Sophocles;
and the greatest of all the Aristophanic triumphs in the _Frogs_. It
was all _him_, Balaustion says:

"There blazed the glory, there shot black the shame"

--it showed every facet of his genius, and in it Bacchos himself was
"duly dragged through the mire," and Euripides, after all the promises,
was more vilely treated than ever before.

"So, Aristophanes obtained the prize,
And so Athenai felt she had a friend
Far better than her 'best friend,' lost last year."

But then, what happened? The great battle of AEgos Potamos was fought and
lost, and Athens fell into the hands of the Spartans. The conqueror's
first words were, "Down with the Piraeus! Peace needs no bulwarks." At
first the stupefied Athenians had been ready to obey--but when the next
decree came forth, "No more democratic government; _we_ shall appoint
your oligarchs!" the dreamers were stung awake by horror; they started
up a-stare, their hands refused their office.

"Three days they stood, stared--stonier than their walls."

Lysander, the Spartan general, angered by the dumb delay, called a
conference, issued decree. Not the Piraeus only, but all Athens should be
destroyed; every inch of the "mad marble arrogance" should go, and so at
last should peace dwell there.

* * * * *

Balaustion stands, recalling this to Euthukles, who writes her
words . . . and now, though she does not name it so, she tells the third
"supreme adventure" of her life. When that decree had sounded, and the
Spartans' shout of acquiescence had died away:

"Then did a man of Phokis rise--O heart! . . .
_Who_ was the man of Phokis rose and flung
A flower i' the way of that fierce foot's advance"

--the "choric flower" of the _Elektra_, full in the face of the foe?

"You flung that choric flower, my Euthukles!"

--and, gazing down on him from her proud rosy height, while he sits
gazing up at her, she chants again the words she spoke to her
girl-friends at the Baccheion:

"So, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,
And poetry is power, and Euthukles
H