And Euripides prepares his audience for the pathetic departure of Alcestis to the underworld by a sharp dialogue between Apollo and Death, who is at once as old and as lusty as Death in the Morality plays. [Illustration: STREET OF THE TOMBS Monument of Hegeso ] After the battle of Chæronea Philip sent back the ashes of the dead Athenians, and Demosthenes counted it the highest honour to deliver their funeral oration. But the noblest association with this spot is the great oration of Pericles, who was chosen in the course of the Peloponnesian War to pronounce the public eulogy over the dead warriors. These were borne along in cypress chests, with one empty litter to represent those whose bodies had not been recovered. The long speech is the incarnation of the Athenian spirit and of Pericles’s own undaunted policy. Thucydides represents him as saying:— “They received praise that grows not old and a most illustrious tomb; not that in which they here are laid but wherever, as occasion arises, there remaineth the ever-living glory of their word and work. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men, and not only in their own land does an inscription upon columns tell of it, but in other lands an unwritten memory dwells within the mind of all.” The “Cerameicus” was soon to receive Pericles. The great plague carried off the orator’s sons, and, overcome by grief and the shipwreck of his plans, he died himself in the next year. Thucydides describes the plague with appalling vigour. The misery and danger were aggravated by the congestion of the country folk crowding in to escape the Peloponnesian invaders. Bivouacked in stifling “shacks” during the hot summer, they died uncared-for and lay where they fell, dying upon one another, at home, in the streets, or by the fountains where they had tried in vain to quench their fever. In the “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles the plague at Thebes is pictured in terms certainly reminiscent, at least here and there, of what must have been the most awful memory of the poet’s life. The blight that has fallen alike on the land and on its inhabitants is described by the Chorus:— “Nay, for no longer the glorious Earth Yieldeth her young; nor by ever a birth Of a child do our women change sorrow to mirth. You may see how they’re flocking like birds of unrest Or swifter than fire’s unquenchable quest, Afar to the shore of the God in the West. “They are unnumbered, dead and dying, The city’s children, unpitied they’re lying, With no one to mourn them, outstretched on the ground, Death and pestilence spreading around.”