Aeschylus

or of the thing he does, as Aeschylus, who, having uttered the mysteries on the stage, was judged in the Areopagus and so released, having shown himself not initiated;

To the one who toils there is due from the gods the offspring of his toil, glory.

Aeschylus too, laying hold of this thought, says:

Let Aeschylus come forward, who was not a poet only, but a Pythagorean too — for so we have been told.

as that Prometheus of Aeschylus, to whom, when it had been said:

And the saying of Aeschylus was, it seems, far more correctly applicable to the unjust man.

and when we have set up an unjust man of this character, our theory must set the just man at his side—a simple and noble man, who, in the phrase of Aeschylus, does not wish to seem but be good.

nor again must we permit our youth to hear what Aeschylus says— A god implants the guilty cause in men When he would utterly destroy a house, but if any poets compose a Sorrows of Niobe, the poem that contains these iambics, or a tale of the Pelopidae or of Troy, or anything else of the kind, we must either forbid them to say that these woes are the work of God, or they must devise some such inter …

To this fable Aeschylus hath accommodated a whole tragedy which he calls Psychostasia, wherein he introduceth Thetis and Aurora standing by Jupiter’s balances, and deprecating each of them the death of her son engaged in a duel.

And Aeschylus also makes it a point of wisdom not to be blown up with pride when a man is honored, nor to be moved or elevated with the acclamations of a multitude, writing thus of Amphiaraus:

For Aeschylus, when, upon one of the fighters at fisticuffs in the Isthmian games receiving a blow on the face, there was made a great outcry among the people, said:

AEACUS By Zeus, not he — but he kissed Aeschylus when he came down, and held out his right hand, and Aeschylus yielded the throne to him;

AESCHYLUS Demeter, you who nourished my mind, let me be worthy of your mysteries.

AESCHYLUS First, by dressing kings in rags, so they'd seem pitiable to men.

Thus it was Aeschylus who first raised the number of the actors from one to two.

And the proof is that all who have dramatized the Sack of Troy as a whole, and not, like Euripides, piecemeal, or the Niobe story as a whole and not like Aeschylus, either fail or fare badly in competition.

The fourth kind results from an inference;

For in the Greek Tragedy of the Suppliants, Aeschylus has introduced the people thus addressing the king:

This was a received opinion in ancient times, as we find from the language of Aeschylus, in whose Tragedy of the Suppliants, the King of Argos, addressing a number of the daughters of Danaus, on their coming from Egypt, says, “If the sons of Egypt exercise controul over you, maintaining that they are authorised to do so by the law of the state, as being the nearest allied by blood, who can resist them?

Aeschylus also doth justly reprimand those who think death to be an evil, declaring after this manner:

— He store of wisdom and of virtue hath, Whom nothing from the Gods provokes to wrath.

Aeschylus says of a young woman that, if ever she have played the wanton, you may discover it in her eyes, and read her affections in amorous glances which she cannot conceal;

Sophocles said of himself, that in writing his tragedies he first of all abated and pricked the tumor of Aeschylus’s invention, then corrected the harshness and over artifice of his composition, and, last of all, changed his very style and elocution, the thing which is most considerably persuasive, and which most of all conduces to good manners.

Aeschylus chanced to be a spectator at the Isthmian games, where some were engaged at sword play;

, not easy to understand, in the opinion of his stoutest advocate among the ancients;

while, with respect to amplifications and embellishments,—anything rather than, with the good farmer, experience that most signal of mortifications, to gape for Aeschylus and get Theognis.

But then I had another pain, a tragic one, the day I sat gaping in expectation of Aeschylus, and the crier called out, "Bring on your chorus, Theognis!

We ourselves asked for this transformation, and, as Aeschylus has it, These are no borrowed feathers, but truly our own.

and then he immediately said, Shall I consider Aeschylus the first among the poets, full of empty sound, unpolished, bombastic, using rugged words?

Over a shield, as they say once in Aeschylus, slaughtering a sheep.

And you, young man, whoever you are, I want to question you in the manner of Aeschylus, out of the Lycurgus play.

But a man may be ignorant of (2) what he is doing, as for instance when people say it slipped out while they were speaking, or they were not aware that the matter was a secret, as Aeschylus said of the Mysteries;

I ought rather to say Aeschylus, or whoever else, like him, vividly setting forth the magnitude of a calamity, lamented it with a loud voice.

Or is it because Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, and many others give delight, men who expressed not the words but the force of the Greek poets—how much more will the philosophers delight us, if, as those poets imitated Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, so these were to imitate Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus!

for some shared in the contest of Sophocles with Aeschylus, as of a young man with an old, and with Euripides, as of an older man with a younger;

For they fined Homer (so says Heraclides) 50 drachmae for a madman, and said Tyrtaeus was beside himself, and they honoured Astydamas before Aeschylus and his brother poets with a bronze statue.

This passage is parallel to a better known passage in the Eumenides of Æschylus, in which Apollo, as advocate for Orestes, argues that he was not of kin to his mother, Clytemnestra, whom he had killed.

It was from this legend and no other that Aeschylus son of Euphorion took a notion which is in no poet before him:

So it seemed clear to us that this was the one we were seeking, and was the cause of right conduct in the state, and precisely as Aeschylus’ line expresses it, is seated alone at the helm of the city, steering the whole, commanding the whole, and making the whole useful.

And the journey is not as Telephus says in the play of Aeschylus;