(c) He was repeatedly victorious in the dramatic competitions, but in 468 was defeated by Sophocles.

(d) He made at least two visits to the court of Hiero of Syracuse, and died at Gela in 456.

(e) A number of stories are told of him, some of which no doubt rest on a basis of truth.

His childhood and youth witnessed the first drama in the great trilogy of the liberation of Athens.

(a) Peisistratus died in 527, leaving the tyranny to his sons Hippias and Hipparchus.

(b) The assassination of Hipparchus by Harmodius and Aristogeiton in 514.

(c) The exile of Hippias in 510 ended the rule of the tyrants at Athens.

(d) The design of Sparta to restore Hippias failed in the dispersion of the invading army at Eleusis in 505, and the refusal of the allies to renew the attempt.

His prime, 502-479, saw the life and death struggle of Greece with Persia, Europe with Asia, civilization with barbarism, light with darkness.

(a) The revolt of Ionia in 502 and the aid given by Athens to her kinsmen beyond the sea brought her into relation with the great world-power of that time, and foreshadowed Salamis.

(b) The fall of Miletus after the battle of Lade in 496 made the struggle inevitable.

(c) The battle of Marathon, 490, was no less splendid in its daring than far-reaching in its effects.

(d) The naval battle of Salamis, 480, and the land battle of Platæa, 479, freed Athens from the danger of a foreign yoke.

The last period of his life, 478-456, saw the march of triumphant democracy at home and abroad.

(a) The bold position of Athens as leader of the Delian confederacy gave her the maritime hegemony. A confederacy to guard against Persian encroachment became a great empire.

(b) In Athens Aristeides and Cimon, both nobles, attempted to stop the advance of the demos by enlarging but defining its power.

(c) Pericles, an Alemæonid, was the champion of the liberal party. He introduced pay for assembly and jury duty and limited the power of the Areopagus. Aeschylus became more and more out of tune with the new order.

Of all the seventy or more dramas accredited to Aeschylus only seven have been preserved, four in addition to the Orestes trilogy.

(a) The Suppliants is of uncertain date, but on grounds of structure and style probably the earliest of the extant plays.

(b) The Persians was produced in 472, seven years after the events on which it is founded.

(c) The Seven Against Thebes was produced in 467, and obtained the victory. The competitors were Aristias and Polyphradmon.

(d) Prometheus, of uncertain date, stands next to the Orestes trilogy in force and beauty.

Aeschylus wrote in trilogies, one of which, the Oresteia, produced in 458, in the full ripeness of his power, is preserved.

(a) The story of the House of Pelops exemplifies the dread power of Nemesis.

transgression.

The inherited curse begets individual

(b) The three dramas, the Agamemnon, the Choephora and the Emenides, are not only episodes from the same story, but they have a causal nexus, and the whole forms an artistic unity.

The Agamemnon relates the murder of the "King of Men" by Clytemnestra as he returns a conqueror from the capture of Troy.

(a) The story of the play.

(b) The fate of Agamemnon is due to the inherited ancestral Ate, but follows his own individual transgression. (c) The characters of Clytemnestra, Cassandra and Aegisthus.

The art of Aeschylus.

(a) Everything about his dramas is organic. The chorus might often be called the protagonist. There are no prologues; and the role of messenger is purely incidental.

(b) His thought is massive, Homeric in its elevation; but individual in its rugged strength.

(c) The religious tone pervades all his work. His themes are the great ethical problems of humanity.

(d) In the boldness and rapidity of his tropology he is akin to Pindar, but he is rather brooding than sententious, and mystic than didactic.

(e) He paints his characters directly in action, not by subtle analysis and ingenious dialogue.

TOPICS FOR STUDY.

The moral effects of the Persian war.

The progress from democracy to ochlocracy.

The life of Aeschylus.

The tropology of the Agamemnon.

The characters of Cassandra, Agamemnon, Aegisthus.

What marks the Suppliants as one of Aeschylus's early plays?

LECTURE IV.

Sophocles.

Even less is known of his life than that of Aeschylus.

(a) He was the son of Sophillus, born about 496 B. C., at Colonus, an Attic deme about a mile from Athens.

(b) He was educated by the best masters, in music by the famous teacher Lamprus, and was evidently associated with the best Athenian society. His father must therefore have had considerable means.

(c) At the age of sixteen he was selected by reason of his skill and his personal beauty to lead the chorus of boys who sang the pæan around the trophy erected in honor of the victory of Salamis.

(d) In 468 he competed with Aeschylus for the tragic prize, and won. From this time till his death he was occupied chiefly with his art, having produced, it is said, more than one hundred tragedies. He is said to have taken first prize eighteen or twenty times, and never to have fallen below the second place.

(e) The Antigone, brought out in 441, received the first prize, and the poet was chosen the next year one of the ten generals with Pericles to conduct the Samian war.

(f) He may have been one of the Committee of Safety who in 413 set up the government of the four hundred. He died in 405.

(g) The story of the suit instituted by his son Iophon to prove his dotage and lunacy is probably a later fabrication. The accounts of his death are clearly apocryphal.

Sophocles expressed the age of Pericles in poetry.

(a) As Ictinus, the architect of the Parthenon and of the Temple of Apollo at Phigalia, did in architecture.

(b) As Pheidias, the friend of Pericles, the sculptor who adorned the Parthenon with pediment groups, frieze and

metopes, and who placed within it the colossal chryselephantine statue of Athene, did in sculpture.

(c) The arts of music and painting have left no remains that give us an adequate basis of judgment, but through their medium, too, a great soul-territory was conquered for the uses of civilization.

External changes introduced by Sophocles.

(a) The dramatic unit was changed from the trilogy to the single play, and three disconnected tragedies were produced in succession.

(b) A third actor was added, making the dialogue more complex and more effective, and the proportion of the choral odes was proportionately reduced.

(c) The chorus was increased in number from twelve to fifteen, and a greater richness of costuming and scenic decoration was introduced.

Internal changes.

(a) The subjects, though taken from the same inherited stock of epic and heroic legends, are developed on the basis of human character and human motive. Dæmonism gives place to humanism.

(b) The chorus no longer takes the part of protagonist nor even is concerned as a main interest. The choral songs,

though appropriate to the action, are not a part of it.

(c) The dialogue received an added importance which quite changes its functions, increasing the complexity of plot, and exhibiting the intricate play of motive.

The extant plays of Sophocles are seven, four in addition to the three that deal with the history of the house of Oedipus.

(a) The Trachinian Maidens, the least worthy of Sophocles' dramas, is of uncertain date. It treats the story of Hercules and Deianeira and the fatal garment of Nessus.