He begins again with the opening lines of another

 “Cadmus, Agenor’s offspring, setting sail From Sidon’s city—”  “Lost a little flask.” 

“Lost a little flask.”

Then he tries with the first lines of a third

 “Great Bacchus, who with wand and fawn-skin decked, In pine-groves of Parnassus, plies the dance, And leads the revel—”  “Lost a little flask.” 

“Lost a little flask.”

The reader may have had enough. It will suffice to give the result of the contest. All the tests have been applied. Euripides, as a last resource, reminds the judge that he has sworn to take him back with him.[Pg 11]

[Pg 11]

Bacchus replies:

“My tongue hath sworn; yet Æschylus I choose.”

A cruel cut, for it is an adaptation of one of the poet’s own lines (from the Hippolytus) when the hero, taunted with the oath that he had taken and is about to violate, replies:

“My tongue hath sworn it, but my mind’s unsworn.”

When the curtain rose from the floor and hid the last scene, it was manifest that the “Frogs” of Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the tribe Pandionis, and the township Cydathenæa, was a success. Of course there were malcontents among the audience. Euripides had a good many partisans in young Athens. They admired his ingenuity, his rhetoric, and the artistic quality of his verse, in which beauty for beauty’s sake, quite apart from any moral purpose, seemed to be aimed at. They were captivated by the boldness and novelty of his treatment of things moral and religious. Æschylus they considered to be old-fashioned and bigoted. Hence among the seats allotted to the young men there had been some murmurs of dissent while the performance was going on, and now there was a good deal of adverse criticism. And there were some among the older men who were scarcely satisfied. The fact was that Comedy was undergoing a change, the change which before twenty more years had passed was to turn the Old Comedy into the Middle and the New, or to put the matter briefly, to 

 Prev. P 11/228 next