Far more pleasant is it to know that Sophocles was deeply affected by his death, and in the next play he produced forbade the actors to wear crowns or their usual gorgeous dresses. The Athenians were prone to unavailing regret. Often they would say in their haste, "We are betrayed," and banish or put to death men who had served them well. Socrates had not been dead many years, before, with "woe that too late repented," they acknowledged having condemned a just man, and turned rabidly on his accusers for misleading them. And so, when Euripides was no more, they sent envoys to Pella to bring home his remains. But his host Archelaus would not part with them, and buried them with much pomp and circumstance; and his countrymen were fain to content themselves with a cenotaph on the road from Peiræus to the city, and with a bust or statue of the poet, which they placed in the Dionysiac theatre. They,
"Slowly wise and meanly just,
To buried merit raised the tardy bust;"
and they were not the first, nor will they be the last, of nations, to imagine posthumous homage compensation for years of detraction. Books or furniture that had belonged to Euripides were much sought for and highly prized by their possessors; and Dionysius of Syracuse, himself a dramatic poet, and not an unsuccessful one, purchased at a high price his tablets and pen, and dedicated them in the Temple of the Muses in his own capital. "They kept his bones in Arqua;" and there was seemingly, for centuries after
