When we meet Balaustion again, in “Aristophanes’ Apology,” many things have happened.  She has seen her poet in his retirement (this was mentioned in her “adventure"), kissed his hand, and received from it, together with other gifts, his tragedy of Herakles.  Euripides has died; Athens has fallen; and Balaustion, with her memories in her heart, and her husband, Euthykles, by her side, is speeding back towards Rhodes.  She is deeply shocked by the fate of her adoptive city, to which her fancy pays a tribute of impassioned reverence, too poetic to be given in any but Mr. Browning’s words.  Yet she has a growing belief that that fate was just.  Sea and air and the blue expanse of heaven are full of suggestion of that spirit-life, with its larger struggles or its universal peace, which is above the world’s crowd and noise.  And she determines that sorrow for what is fleeting shall not gnaw at her heart.

But in order to overcome the sorrow, she must loosen it from her.  The tragedy she has witnessed must enact itself once more for Euthykles and her, he writing as she dictates.  It will have for prologue a second adventure of her own, which he also has witnessed; and this adventure will constitute the book.  It is prefaced in its turn by a backward glance at the circumstances, (so different from the present) in which she related the first.

It was the night on which Athens received the news that Euripides was dead:  Euthykles had brought this home to her from the theatre.  They were pondering it gravely, but not sadly, for their poet was now at rest, in the companionship of AEschylus, safe from the petty spites which had frothed and fretted about his life.  He had lived and worked, to the end, true to his own standard of right, heedless of the reproach that he was a man-hater and a recluse, without regard for civic duty, and with no object but his art.  He had left it to Sophocles to play poet and commander at the same time, and be laughed at for the result.  He had first taken the prize of “Contemplation” in his all but a hundred plays; then, grasping the one hand offered him which held a heart, had shown at the court of Archelaus of Macedon whether or not the power of active usefulness was in him.  His last notes of music had also been struck for that one friend.

Even Athens did him justice now.  The reaction had set in; one would have his statue erected in the theatre; another would have him buried in the Piraeus; etc. etc.  Not so Euthykles and Balaustion.  His statue was in their hearts.  Their concern was not with his mortal vesture, but with the liberated soul, which now watched over their world.  They would hail this, they said, in the words of his own song, his “Herakles.”