It is evident how he has been moved, despite his boasting—how eagerly he awaits her use of the rosy strength. . . . But she begins meekly enough. She is a woman, she says, and claims no quality "beside the love of all things lovable"; in that, she does claim to stand pre-eminent. But men may use, justifiably, different methods from those which women most admire, and so far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers, will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they find Aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides also; and has Aristophanes yet written anything like the glorious Song to Peace in the Cresphontes?
"Come, for the heart within me dies away,
So long dost thou delay!"
She gives this forth, in the old "Syracusan" manner, and is well aware that he can have no answer for her. Again (she proceeds), Euripides discredited war by showing how it outrages the higher feelings: by what method has Aristophanes discredited it? By the obscene allurements of the Lysistrata! . . . Thus she takes him through his works, and finally declares that only in "more audaciously lying" has he improved upon the earlier writers of comedy. He has genius—she gladly 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!"