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;

Aeschylus too, laying hold of this thought, says:

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

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.

Then, though there are many other things that we praise in Homer, this we will not applaud, the sending of the dream by Zeus to Agamemnon, nor shall we approve of Aeschylus when his Thetis avers that Apollo singing at her wedding, foretold the happy fortunes of her issue — Their days prolonged, from pain and sickness free, And rounding out the tale of heaven’s blessings, Raised the proud paean, making glad my heart.

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?

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?

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;

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;

And did you not laud Aeschylus the Phleiasian to me and me to him until you brought us to such a pass that in mutual yearning, excited by your words, we went coursing like hounds to find each other?