so richly furnished. with celebrities, very probably resembled the better-known assemblages at Sans Souci; but we do not read that the Macedonian prince put on his crown, as Frederick the Great did his cocked-hat, when his guests, Bacchi pleni, were becoming personal, or trespassing on the royal preserve of politics.
Euripides did not long enjoy "retired leisure." He died at Pella in the 76th year of his age, in the year 406 B.C., having, as is supposed, quitted Athens in 408. But his enemies, so far as it lay with them, did not permit him to depart in peace, or even in reputable fashion. One report, current indeed long after his decease, makes him to have been torn to pieces by mastiffs set upon him by two rival poets, Arrhidæus and Cratenas; another, that he was killed by women when on his way to keep an assignation. This bit of scandal is probably an echo of his ill-repute at home as a woman-hater; and the story of the mastiffs may be a disguise of the fact that he was "cut up" by Macedonian theatrical critics. Yet one who had been handled as he was by Aristophanes and survived, might well have set at nought all dogs, biped or quadruped: and as to nocturnal trysts, they are seldom proposed, or at least kept, by gentlemen over threescore and ten."[1]
- ↑ This story of dogs and angry women is indeed noticed in some verses ascribed to Sophocles, who, as Schlegel says, uttered "some cutting sayings against Euripides." To readers interested in the matter, it may he convenient to be told that it is mentioned by Athenæus, book xiii. p. 557. Against Sophocles, if the gossip collected by Plutarch is accepted, there were also some "sayings" of a similar kind, and far less creditable to him.
