"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 Piræus 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
Had faith therein to, full-face, fling the same—
Sudden, the ice-thaw! The assembled foe,
Heaving and swaying with strange friendliness,
Cried 'Reverence Elektra!'—cried
. . . 'Let stand
Athenai'! . . ."