meeting in disguise and speak in his defence. The intruder is discovered and handed over to a policeman; he eventually escapes by his son-in-law's help. Euripides hums fragments of his own plays behind the scenes, and the prisoner hums answering fragments under the policeman's nose, till the plot is arranged. The play was acted twice in slightly different versions.
In the next few years we have the Lemnian Women,* about the newly-established worship of Bendis at the Piræus; the Gêrŷtadês,* which seems to have been similar in plot to the Frogs; and the Phœnissæ,* in mere parody—a new departure this—of Euripides's tragedy of that name. We have also a play directed against Alcibiades, the Triphalês.* It dealt certainly with his private life, and possibly with his public action. If so, it is the last echo of the political drama of the fifth century, a production for which the world has never again possessed sufficient 'parrhêsia'—'free-spokenness.'
The death of Euripides in 406 gave Aristophanes the idea of founding a whole play, the Frogs, on the contrast between the poetry of his childhood and that which was called new—though, as a matter of fact, this latter was passing swiftly out of existence. Æschylus and Euripides were dead, Sophocles dying; Agathon had retired to Macedonia. The patron-god of the drama, Dionysus, finds life intolerable with such miserable poets as now are left him. He resolves to go to Hades and fetch Euripides back. When he gets there—his adventures on the way, disguised as Heracles, but very unworthy of the lion's skin, are among the best bits of fun in Aristophanes—he finds that after all Euripides is not alone. Æschylus is there too; and the position becomes delicate. The two were already disputing about the
