Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/211

 the dog Cerberus, descends to bring back Euripides from the infernal world. On his way, Bacchus inquires of Hercules "what entertainers he had met when he went to fetch Cerberus, what harbours, bakers' shops, lodging-houses, springs, roads, cities, hostesses"—earthly associations well kept up when Proserpine's servant tells the pseudo-Hercules that "the goddess, when she heard of his arrival, began baking loaves, boiled some pots of soup of bruised peas, broiled a whole ox, and baked cheese-cakes and rolls." But two innkeepers of Hades think they recognise in the pseudo-Hercules "the villain who came into our inn one day and devoured sixteen loaves, twenty pieces of boiled meat at half an obol apiece, and vast quantities of garlic and dried fish." For these depredations the innkeepers determine to take vengeance; and Bacchus, in fear of the coming evil, gets his slave Xanthias to assume the lion's skin and club of Hercules. Æacus, attended by three myrmidons, now enters; but the slave-hero holds his own, tells Æacus to go to the mischief, and as a proof of innocence offers Bacchus, now supposed to be his slave, to be tortured for evidence in true Athenian fashion. Xanthias and Æacus, farther on in the play, congratulate each other on the delight they take in prying into their masters' secrets, and then "blabbing them out of doors;" and Æacus tells his fellow-servant of the quarrel between Æschylus and Euripides, with whose famous contest the rest of the play is taken up. "There is a law established here," says Æacus," that out of the professions, as many as are important and ingenious, he who is the best of his own fellow-artists should receive a public maintenance in the Prytaneum and a seat next to Pluto's." Æschylus had held the "tragic seat," as being "the best in his art;" but Euripides, when he came down," began to show off to