How do our little squabbles—the "Sex-War"—look to us after this?
When next we meet with Balaustion, in Aristophanes' Apology, she is married to her Euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the waters—this time back to Rhodes, from Athens which has fallen.
Many things have happened in the meantime, and Balaustion, leaving her adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of Athens, she may free herself from anguish. Euthukles shall write it down for her, and they will go back to the night they heard Euripides was dead: "One year ago, Athenai still herself." Together she and Euthukles had mused, together glorified their poet. Euthukles had met the audience flocking homeward from the theatre, where Aristophanes had that night won the prize which Euripides had so seldom won. They had stopped him to hear news of the other poet's death: "Balaustion's husband, the right man to ask"—but he had refused them all satisfaction, and scornfully rated them for the crown but now awarded. "Appraise no poetry," he had cried: "price cuttlefish!"
Balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in Athens, but one work of Aristophanes, the Lysistrata; and now, in breathless 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 Piræus—Thucydides shall make his epitaph!"
But she was not moved to sympathy with the general cry.