all the ways of men, commanding attention by sheer force of brain-power. He was baited incessantly by a rabble of comic writers, and of course by the great pack of the orthodox and the vulgar. He was beaten. After producing the Orestes in 408, he left Athens for the court of Archelaus of Macedon. We hear that he went "because of the malicious exultation of almost everybody," though we have no knowledge of what the exultation was grounded on. In Macedon he found peace, and probably some congenial society. Agathon the tragedian and Timotheus the musician were there, both old friends of his, and the painter Zeuxis, and probably Thucydides. Doubtless the barbarism underneath the smooth surface of the Macedonian court, must sometimes have let itself appear. The story of Euripides being killed by the king's hounds is disproved by the silence of Aristophanes; but it must have produced a curious effect on the Athenian when one of the courtiers, who had addressed him rudely, was promptly delivered up to him to be scourged! He died about eighteen months after reaching Macedon; but the peace and comfort of his new surroundings had already left their mark upon his work. There is a singular freshness and beauty in the two plays, Bacchcæ and Iphigenîa in Aulis, which he left unfinished at his death; and the former at any rate has traces of Macedonian scenery (565 ff.). Of the Archelaus,* which he wrote in his host's honour, but few fragments survive.
Not that in the last period of Euripides's work at Athens his gloom is unmixed. There is nothing that better illustrates the man's character than the bright patches in these latest plays, and the particular forms taken by his still-surviving ideals. In his contempt for society and
