"For neither was it thunderbolt from God,
With flashing fire that slew him, nor the blast
Of whirlwind sweeping o'er the sea's dark waves;
But either some one whom the Gods had sent
To guide his steps, or gentleness of mood
Had moved the Powers beneath to ope the way
To earth's deep centre painlessly. He died
No death to mourn for, did not leave the world
Worn out with pain and sickness, but his end,
If any ever was, was wonderful."
One tradition relative to this period is, in spite of some uncertainty, too honourable and too interesting to be passed over. Euripides, as has been said above, after a career of success at Athens, in which he had not seldom triumphed over his greater rival, went, cir. B.C. 406, to Macedonia, on the invitation of Archelaos. A personal dispute with one of the king s officers involved him and his friend Agathon in a quarrel, in which he lost his life. The news came to Athens, and Sophocles, then in extreme old age, a few months before his death, was bringing out a tragedy. In honour of the memory of his great rival, in token of his forgetting all feelings of jealous emulation, if he had ever known them, he appeared on the stage at the head of a chorus, clad in mourning apparel, and without the wreaths which the members of a choral company usually wore on their entrance, and laid upon the altar.[1]
Such an old age, in its calm serenity, in its full enjoyment of the reverence and admiration of his con-
- ↑ Thomas Magist., Vit. Eurip.
