The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

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.

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.