The Historians' History of the World 03

But the poets lived in the midstream of civic life, and it is not to be supposed that, in a city like Athens, men who at public festivals set forth the creations of their genius in the public eye, could remain indifferent to the questions of their own day. They were obliged of necessity to belong to one party or another, and if they were sincere and candid, their views as to what was for the good of the commonwealth could not but appear in their works. Their choice of subject was still limited in the main to mythology; man’s strength of will, his deeds and sufferings, the contradiction between laws human and divine, were still set forth by preference in the characters of the Homeric age of which the tradition survived in the epos. These were the prototypes of the human race, their sufferings were the sufferings and entanglements incident to the whole human race; in contemplating them the spectators were to be freed from what was personal in their sorrows and cares, the narrow bounds of their self-consciousness were to be widened, and they were to receive from the performance not only the highest artistic pleasure, but a cheering and healing purification of their hearts. These heroes of olden times were in harmony with the ideal character which the dramatists were bent on giving to the whole world of the stage; but the impression was none the less striking because the audience was transported into a dim and legendary past. We feel the spirit of the warrior of Marathon in the warlike plays of Æschylus, and the spectator of his Seven against Thebes glowed with eagerness to strike a blow for his country.

Meanwhile Phrynichus had ventured to put modern events on the stage, and his Fall of Miletus

and Phœnissæ were no doubt fraught with political intention. Æschylus followed the example of his predecessor in a far grander style when, four years after the production of the Phœnissæ

of Phrynichus, he produced his drama of the Persæ. He depicted the fall of the Great King. But with fine artistic instinct he chose Persia, not Attica, for the scene of his tragedy. He brings before our eyes the consequences of the battle, its reaction upon the hostile empire, in its own capital. Darius is conjured from the grave that in the person of the pious and prudent ruler may be set forth the glory of the inviolate Persian empire, while his successor returns from Hellas shorn of all dignity, a warning example of the ruin which foolish arrogance brings upon all sovereign power. The whole composition is pervaded by the idea of retribution, which had been awakened in the Greek mind by the Persian wars.

In the tragedy of Phrynichus, Themistocles is extolled above all other men, while Æschylus only alludes to him in passing as the inventor of a subtle stratagem. On the other hand the latter gives a detailed account of the fight on Psyttalea, so exalting the fame of Aristides, who contributed substantially to the victory of Salamis, not by sea, but by land.

The Persæ was the middle play of a trilogy and comes to no final conclusion. The shade of Darius hints at other defeats in the future, and at the struggles of Platæa. From Glaucus

, the third play of the trilogy, an allusion to Himera has been preserved. The first part, Phineus, takes its name from the mythical seer who revealed to the Argonauts their coming voyage to the land of the northern barbarians. Hence, it is extremely probable that all three plays were linked together by a single idea, the idea (present to all thinking men of the time) of the great struggle between barbarian and Greek, between Asia and Europe, which had its mythical prelude in the voyage of the Argonauts, and came to its glorious issue on the battlefields of Greece and Sicily. In like manner Herodotus had conceived of the Persian War as one link in a great chain of historical development, and Pindar had associated Salamis, Platæa, and Himera as ranking equally among the glorious days of the Greeks; and we may be sure that the trilogy of the Persæ would not have been acted at the court of Hiero unless it had fully satisfied the tyrant’s love of praise.