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τοῦτον τὸν βακχεῖον ἅνακτα.--ARISTOPHANES.
. . . personæ pallæque repertor honestæ.--HORACE.
THE richest heritage that a great dramatic poet can receive from the
past, is a various store of legendary tradition, in the shape of ballads
or popular epos; the greatest present blessing that can happen to him
from Heaven, is to live in an age when every mighty thought to which he
can give utterance finds a ready response in the hearts of the people,
urged by the memory of great deeds recently achieved, to aspire after
greater yet to come. Both these blessings were enjoyed by the founder of
the serious lyrical drama of the Greeks. In Homer, Æschylus recognised
his heritage from the past.[f1] Marathon and Salamis were the first
sublime motions of those strong popular breezes by which the flight of
his eagle muse was sustained.
The Parian marble, more trustworthy than the discordant statements of
ill-informed, or ill-transcribed lexicographers and scholiasts, enables
us to fix the date of Æschylus, in the year 525 before Christ. Born an
Athenian, in the deme of Eleusis, of an ancient and noble family, he had
ample opportunity, by the contagion of the place, in his boyish days, of
brooding over those lofty religious ideas which formed the
characteristic inspiration of his drama,[f2] Pausanias (I. 21)
relates of him that, on one occasion, when he was watching the vineyards
as a mere boy, Dionysus appeared to him and ordered him to write dramas.
Of this story, we may say that it either is true, literally, or invented
to symbolize something that must have been true. The next authentic fact
in the life of the poet, testified by Suidas, is that in his
twenty-fifth year (499, B.C.), the same in which Sardes was burnt by the
Ionians, he first appeared as a competitor for the tragic prize. But, as
the strongest intellectual genius is often that which, like the oak,
grows slowest, we do not find him registered as having actually gained
the prize in such a competition till the lapse of sixteen years.
Meanwhile, the soul of Greece had been called out at Marathon to prepare
the world, as it were, for {29} that brilliant display of
self-dependence which was afterwards made at Salamis. At both these
victories, which belonged to the world as much as to Greece, Æschylus
was present, as also, according to some accounts, at Artemisium and
Platæae--learning in all these encounters how much more noble it is to
act poetry than to sing it, and borrowing from them certain high
trumpet-notes of martial inspiration that stirred the soul deeper than
any that could have been fetched from the fountains of Helicon, or the
double peak of Parnassus. Braced in this best school of manhood, he
continued his exertions as a dramatic poet, bringing gradually to
firmness and maturity the dim broodings of his early years, till, in the
year 484, according to the marble already quoted, he was publicly
declared victor in that species of composition, of which, from the great
improvement he made in it, he was afterwards to be celebrated as the
father. In a few years after this, he, with his brother Ameinias,
performed a distinguished part at the battle of Salamis; and this
victory he eight years afterwards celebrated in his play of the
PERSIANS, the earliest of his extant productions, of which the date is
certainly known.[f3] The next mention that we find of the poet,
among the few stray and comparatively unimportant notices that remain,
is that some time between the year 478, that is, two years after the
battle of Salamis, and the year 467, he paid a visit to Sicily, and
along with Pindar, Bacchylides, Simonides, and other famous poets, was
hospitably entertained by Hieron the famous tyrant of Syracuse. The two
dates mentioned are those which mark the beginning and the end of the
reign of that ruler; within which period, of course, the visit to Sicily
must have taken place. Plutarch, in his life of Cimon (c. 8), connects
Æschylus' departure for Sicily with the first tragic victory gained by
the young Sophocles in the year preceding the death of Hiero; but it is
possible that this precise date may have no other foundation than the
story which attributed the Sicilian journey of the elder bard to his
envy of the rising greatness of the younger; an instance of that sort of
impertinence in which small wits constantly indulge when they busy
themselves to assign motives for the actions of great ones. But the
precise period is of small moment. When in Sicily, we are told {30} that
Æschylus re-exhibited his play of the Persians,[f4] and also wrote
a play called the AETNEANS, to celebrate the foundation of the new
city of Etna by his patron. This event, we are informed by Diodorus (xi.
49), took place in the year 476, a date which would require the presence
of the poet in Sicily six years before the date mentioned by Plutarch.
Connected with Sicily, there is worthy of mention also, in a life of
Æschylus, the notable eruption of Etna, which took place in the year
479--the same in which the battle of Platæae took place[f5]--because
there is a distinct allusion to this in the Prometheus Bound
(p. 192), which enables us to say that this famous drama could not have
been written before the forty-seventh year of the poet's life--that is
to say, the full maturity of his powers. The next date in the life of
the poet, according to the recently discovered διδασκαλία to the SEVEN
AGAINST THEBES,[f6] is the representation of the great Oedipodean
tetralogy in the year 467; and the next date is a yet more important
one, the year of the representation of that famous trilogy, still
extant, which has always been looked on as his masterpiece. The
argument of the AGAMEMNON fixes the exhibition of the trilogy of which
it is the first piece, to the year of the archonship of Philocles,
B.C. 458. It is known, also, that the poet died at Gela, in Sicily,
two years afterwards, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, the date
being given in the marble; and there can be little doubt that the
cause of this, his final retirement to that island, must have been a
growing distance between him and the Athenian public, arising from
diversity of political feeling, and the state of parties in the Attic
capital. In that city, democracy had been in steady advance from the
time of Cleisthenes (B.C. 509), and was now ebullient under the popular
inspiration of the recent Persian wars, and glorified by the
captainship of Pericles. The tendencies of the poet of the Eumenides
(as explained in the introduction to that play) were all aristocratic;
and it is in the highest degree probable that the reception given by
democratic spectators to his eulogy of the aristocratic Court of the
Areopagus, in the play just mentioned, may have been such as to induce
him to consult his own comfort, if not his safety, by withdrawing
altogether from a scene where his continual presence might only tend
to irritate those whom it could not alter.
After his death the Athenians testified their esteem for his character
by decreeing--what was quite an extraordinary privilege {31} according
to their stage practice--that his dramas might be exhibited at the great
Dionysiac festivals, when their author could be no longer a competitor
for the prize.[f7] The people of Gela, justly proud that the bones
of so great a man should repose in their soil, erected a monument to his
memory with the following inscription:--
"Here Æschylus lies, from his Athenian home
Remote, 'neath Gela's wheat-producing loam.
How brave in battle was Euphorion's son
The long-haired Mede can tell that fled from Marathon."
With regard to the great merits of Æschylus both as a poet and as the
creator of the tragic stage, there is but one testimony among the
writers of antiquity. He not only introduced, as we have elsewhere
stated, a second, and afterwards a third actor--without which there was
no scope for the proper representation of an action--but he made the
greatest improvements in the whole machinery and decorations of the
stage, gave dignity to the actors by a minute attention to their masks,
dresses, and buskins,[f8] besides attending specially to the
graceful culture of the dance, according to the testimony of Athenæus
above quoted. As a dramatist he is distinguished by peculiar loftiness
of conception and grandeur of phraseology. His style is sometimes harsh
and abrupt, but it is always manly and vigorous; his metaphors are bold
and striking, with something at times almost oriental in their cast;
and, though not free from the offence of mixing incongruous
metaphors--the natural sin of an imagination at once fearless and
fertile--I do not think he can be fairly charged with turgidity and
bombast; for, as Aristophanes remarks, in the FROGS, there is a
superhuman grandeur about his characters which demands a more than
common elevation of phrase.[f9] As to the obscurity with which he
has been charged, {32} the comparative clearness of those plays which
have been most frequently transcribed is a plain indication that this
fault proceeds more from the carelessness of stupid copyists, than from
confusion of thought or inadequate power of expression in the writer. In
some cases, as in the prophecy of Calchas in the opening scene of the
AGAMEMNON, the obscurity is studied and most appropriate. Poetry, like
painting, will have its shade. But the great excellence of Æschylus, as
a poet, is the bracing tone of thorough manhood, noble morality, and
profound piety which pervades his works. Among those who are celebrated
by Virgil as walking with Orpheus and Musæus in blissful Elysium--
"Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,"
the poet of the EUMENIDES deserves the first rank. There is a
tradition current, in various shapes, among the ancient writers that he
was brought before the Court of the Areopagus (so nobly eulogised by
himself), on the charge of impiety, but that he was acquitted. That the
Athenians might have taken offence at the freedom and boldness with
which he handled religious, as other topics, is possible, though
certainly by no means probable, considering how little of fixed doctrine
there was in their imaginative theology; but it is more like the truth,
according to the accounts which we have, that the offence which he gave
consisted in some purely accidental allusion occurring in one of his
plays, to some points that were, or seemed to be connected with the
awful Eleusinian mysteries.[f10] Certain it is that no writer could
be less justly charged with impiety or irreligion. In his writings,
religion is the key-note; and the noblest moral sentiments spring
everywhere from the profoundest faith in a system of retribution carried
on by the various personages of the great celestial aristocracy, of
which Jove is the all-powerful and the all-wise head. So sublime,
indeed, is the Æschylean theology, that certain modern writers, as if
unwilling to think that such pure notions could co-exist with a belief
in the popular religion, have concluded that the poet, like Euripides
afterwards, must have been a free-thinker; and have imagined that they
have found sure indications to this effect in his writings. But, though
Æschylus was a Pythagorean (Cic. Tusc. II. 10), we have no proof that
the Pythagoreans, any more than their successors, the Platonists, were
given to scepticism. The seriousness of a poetic mind like that of
Æschylus is, at all times, naturally inclined to faith; and the
multiform {33} polytheism of the Greeks was as pliable in the hands of
pure men for pure purposes, as in the hands of gross men, to give a
delusive ideality to their grossness.[f11]