A festive supper had followed the successful play.  Jollity was at its height.  The cup was being crowned to Aristophanes as the “Triumphant,” when a knock came to the door:  and there entered no “asker of questions,” no casual passer-by, but the pale, majestic, heavily-draped figure of Sophocles himself.  Slowly, solemnly, and with bent head, he passed up the hall, between two ranks of spectators as silent as himself; raised his eyes as he confronted the priest,[36] and announced to him, that since Euripides was “dead to-day,” and as a fitting spectacle for the god, his chorus would appear at the greater feast, next month, clothed in black and ungarlanded.  Then silently, and amidst silence, he passed out again.

This, then, was the purport of the important news which was known to have arrived in port, but which every one had interpreted in his own way.  Euripides was no more!  But neither the news nor he who brought it could create more than a momentary stupor; and the tipsy fun soon renewed itself, at the expense of the living tragedian and the dead.  Aristophanes alone remained grave.  The value of the man whom he had aspersed and ridiculed stood out before him summed up by the hand of Death.  He recalled the failure which had marked the now hopeless limitation of his own genius, and those last words addressed to him by Euripides which brought home its lesson.[37] The archon, “Master of the Feast,” judging that its “glow” was “extinct,” had risen to conclude it by crowning the parting cup.  He had crowned it with judicious reserve to the “Good Genius;” and Strattis (the comic poet) had burst forth in an eulogium of the Comic Muse which claimed the title of Good Genius for her—­when yielding to this new and over-mastering impulse, he (Aristophanes) checked the coming applause, and demanded that the Tragic Muse and her ministrant Euripides should receive the libation instead; justifying the demand by a noble and pathetic tribute to the memory of the dead poet, and to the great humanities which only the tragic poet can represent.

But he found no response.  The listeners mistook his seriousness for satire, and broke out afresh at the excellence of such a joke; and recovering his presence of mind as quickly as he had lost it, he changed his tone, thanked those alike who had laughed with him, and who had wept with the “Lord of Tears;” and desired that the cup be consecrated to that genius of complex poetry which is tragedy and comedy in one.  It was sacrilege, he declared, to part these two; for to do so was to hack at the Hermai[38]—­to outrage the ideal union of the intellectual and the sensuous life in man.  And from this new vantage-ground he launched another bolt at Euripides, whose coldness, he asserted, had belied this union, and made him guilty of a crime inexpiable in the sight of the gods.

Yet he could not dismiss him from his thoughts.  He wanted to go over the old ground with him, and put himself in the right.  Balaustion and her husband were in a manner representatives of the dead tragedian.  That was why he had come.  He was not sure that he expressed, or at the moment even felt, all that he had just repeated.  “Drunk he was with the good Thasian, and drunk he probably had been.”  Nevertheless, the impulse he had thus obeyed sprang perhaps from some real, if hitherto undiscovered depths in his soul.