And it so happened that Euripides was sitting alone in a wood outside the city, and the hounds fell on him and tore him to pieces. And behold, these hounds proved to be the children of that Molossian who, through the poet's interference, had died unavenged! The story can hardly be true, or we should hear some echo of it in Aristophanes' _Frogs_; but no doubt it was the kind of fate that a lonely man might well meet in Macedonia when the king's hounds were astir. How the poet really died we do not know. We know that he left Athens after the spring of 408, and that he was dead some time before the production of the _Frogs_ in January, 405. And there is reason to believe the story given in the Life that when Sophocles in the previous year was introducing his Chorus in the "Proagon," or Preliminary Appearance, he brought them on without the customary garlands in mourning for his great rival's death. The news, therefore, must have reached Athens by the end of March, 406. Euripides had lived only some eighteen months in Macedon. The time was not long but it was momentous. After his death three plays were found, _Iphigenîa in Aulis_, _Alcmaeon_ and _Bacchae_, sufficiently finished to be put on the stage together by his third son, the Younger Euripides. Two of them are still extant, and one, the _Bacchae_, remains for all time to testify to the extraordinary return of youth which came to the old poet in his last year. A "lightning before death" if ever there was one! But let us take first the _Iphigenîa in Aulis_. It is a play full of problems. We can make out that it was seriously incomplete at the poet's death and was finished by another hand, presumably that of its producer. Unfortunately we do not possess even that version in a complete form. For the archetype of our MSS. was at some time mutilated, and the present end of the play is a patent forgery. But if we allow for these defects, the _Iphigenîa in Aulis_ is a unique and most interesting example of a particular moment in the history of Greek drama. It shows the turning-point between the old fifth century tragedy and the so-called New Comedy which, in the hands of Menander, Philemon and others, dominated the stage of the fourth and third centuries. Euripides had united two tendencies: on the one hand he had moved towards freedom in metre, realism in character-drawing, variety and adventure in the realm of plot; on the other he had strongly maintained the formal and musical character of the old Dionysiac ritual, making full use of such conventions as the Prologue, the Epiphany, the traditional tragic diction, and above all the Chorus. The New Comedy dropped the chorus, brought the diction close to real life, broke up the stiff forms and revelled in romance, variety, and adventure. Its characters ceased to be legendary Kings and Queens; they became fictional characters from ordinary city life.