Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/25

glens, its noble rivers, his muse was kindled with new inspiration; and he wrote with a freedom, a rapidity, a depth and fervour of thought, and a splendour of diction, which even he had scarcely attained before. The Iphigeneia at Aulis and the Bacchanals remain to us out of the four plays which were the fruits of his unharassed leisure.

Death.Felix opportunitate mortis, he was spared the knowledge of the shameful sequel of Arginusæ, the miserable disaster of Aegospotami, the last lingering agony of famished Athens, and her humiliation in the dust before her foes. He died 406 B.C. at the age of seventy-five, more than a year before these calamities befell. For the wild legend of his having been torn by dogs, and for the still wilder story of his death at the hands of furious women, there is no contemporary authority—as there certainly would have been, had any such particulars reached Athens along with the news of his death. When the tidings arrived, a play of Sophocles was on the eve of representation. The old poet put on mourning for his dead rival, and made his actors and chorus appear without their crowns, and the great concourse in the theatre wept aloud. The people sent an embassy entreating that his body might be given to them, but in vain. He was magnificently buried near Arethusa in Macedon, and his tomb was said to have been struck by lightning from Zeus, an honour vouchsafed to none other of men save the ancient lawgiver Lycurgus. His countrymen built a cenotaph to his memory, and graved thereon this:—