36 
Then Dionysus, availing himself of a line of Euripides against 
which criticism was often directed—‘ my tongue has sworn, my 
mind remains unsworn’’—says ‘‘my tongue has sworn, but 
Zaschylus I choose.” So amid the sound of hymns and festal 
songs, by the light of torches, Adschylus is conducted up, and 
leaves strict injunctions that Sophocles is to take his place, and 
not suffer that rascally falsehood-monger and low trickster to 
sit there. 
Dionysus was satisfied: he had recovered one of his devotees ; 
the glory of the Athenian drama, if his wishes were destined to 
be accomplished, would be renewed. The yearning for a clever 
poet was no more to trouble him. But hopes are blighted, and 
mortals are doomed to disappointment, and so was this 
vagabond immortal; tragedy could not be revived. The seventy 
years were accomplished in which the far-famed birth-place of the 
arts was to rise to its eminence, and as suddenly fall; the long 
warfare through which the city had struggled with wondrous 
self-reliance was drawing to its close, and with the fall of the 
power of Athens fell her supremacy in the pursuits which still 
make her famous among men. She, ‘“‘ whose eyes had first in 
man’s flashed lightning liberty, whose tongue had first said 
freedom,’ was to lie prostrate at the feet of merciless conquerors ; 
she who claimed ‘‘ the crown of all songs sung, of all deeds done 
the full flower for all time, ’’ was to be no more heard in the 
councils of Greece. But it redounds to the honour of Athens, 
and points out better than anything else, how extraordinary was 
the outburst of excellence in all arts, in knowledge and wisdom, 
and in expression of feeling by eloquence and poetry, that the 
blow inflicted on these in the little Athenian state by the battle 
in the Dardanelles, September, 405 B.c., was a blow to all culture 
as it then existed in the world. No state rose to take her place: 
these arts flourished though her pride of dominion was taken 
away, and no one came forward to contest her pre-eminence, far 
though it fell below its previous height. Tragedy was dead or 
crushed down, and was not destined to renew its life like a Phoenix 
or to receive vivifying force like an Anteus, till in a little War- 
wickshire market town nearly 2,000 years after a claimant 
should arise, who, if anyone could, might contest the throne of 
honour in the halls of Pluto with the father of the drama. 
England is proud of her Shakespere, and the line of lesser 
tragedians who follow him at an interval; foreign nations boast 
of authors whom in some respects they venture to compare with 
our highest ; but we have 300 years to travel over, a country far 
exceeding in magnitude the state of Athens, and a population of 
freemen which during those 800 years has been from 50 to 200 
times as large as hers, and yet ‘that city which on the Adgean 
sea stands, built nobly” produced three men of the first rank and 
