The Historians' History of the World 03

Æschylus represented the legendary history of the house of Pelops in the three plays of the Oresteia, and that of the royal house of Thebes and the Thracian king, Lycurgus, each in a cycle of three dramas; he worked up the legend of Prometheus so that the conflicts and discords of the several parts find a satisfactory solution in a larger order of things; and thus the poet wove legend and history into a single piece. Prehistoric and present times, East and West, the mother-country and the colonies, all form parts of a grand picture, of a chain of events linked together by prophecy and reciprocal reaction. The poet looks forward and backward, and prophet-like interprets the course of history, seeing the inner necessity revealed to the eye of the spirit. He uplifts the hearts of his people by setting forth the waxing power of the Greeks, the waning might of the barbarians on every side, without a taint of scorn or malicious triumph to vitiate the moral majesty of his work. At the same time he moderates the pride of victory, by pointing to the guilt which brought about the Persian overthrow and to the eternal laws of divine justice, the observance of which is the inexorable condition of the prosperity of the Greeks.

In the tragedies on mythical subjects there was no lack of passages which permitted of or actually challenged application to the events of the day. Next to Aristides, it was Cimon to whom the muse of Æschylus did homage. Like Cimon, the poet was the champion of a common Hellenism, of patriarchal customs, the rule of the best, the discipline of the good old times, and so when the waves of popular agitation rose higher and higher till they threatened the very Areopagus, the last bulwark, the septuagenarian poet led his muse into the strife of conflicting parties and exerted his utmost powers to impress upon his fellow-citizens the sacred dignity of the Areopagus as a divine institution and to warn them of the consequences of sinful license. The Eumenides of Æschylus is a brilliant example of the way in which a great imaginative work may be made to serve a special purpose and express a particular tendency without losing anything of its transparent lucidity or of the sublimity which stamps it as a masterpiece for all time. But though the Areopagus remained unmolested as a court of justice (and we should like to fancy the poem of Æschylus an influential factor in the matter) the poet felt alien and solitary in the city where democracy had completely gained the ascendant. This was not the freedom for which he had bled in the field; the band of those who had fought in the Wars of Liberation dwindled and dwindled; the Oresteia

was the last work he produced in Athens; and he died in his seventieth year at Gela in Sicily (456 B.C.), after a residence there of about two years.

The day of the warriors of Marathon was past, and the new age, the age of Pericles, found exponents in a younger generation, and on the Attic stage in Sophocles. Like Æschylus he was of noble birth, as is indicated by his appointment to be a priest of the hero, Halon, but his father was a craftsman and the head of a great smithy for the manufacture of weapons. He was born in the metalliferous district of Colonus about B.C. 496 and grew up amidst the delightful rural scenery of the valley of the Cephisus, in the shade of the sacred olives that had witnessed the first beginnings of national history, yet near the capital and near the sea, which he overlooked from the crags of Colonus, and where he saw the port grow up during his boyhood years. In the early bloom of youthful beauty he led the dance at the festival held in honour of the victory of Salamis; twelve years later he entered the lists as a rival of the great poet Æschylus, whose inspiring art had attracted him to follow the same path to poetic fame. It was a day of unwonted excitement throughout Athens when all men awaited the issue of the contest between the ambitious young poet and Æschylus, then close upon sixty years of age and twice already the wearer of the laurel crown. The occasion was the same Dionysian festival on which Cimon, having brought the Thracian campaign to a glorious close, came up from the Piræus and offered his thank-offerings to the gods in the orchestra of the theatre. The people were in raptures over the relics of Theseus which he had brought back, and amidst the assenting acclamations of the assembled citizens the archon Apsephion appointed Cimon and his fellow-generals umpires, as being the worthiest representatives of the ten tribes. The result was that the prize was awarded to the Triptolemus trilogy of Sophocles.

Representation of a Reception of Bacchus