"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."