During the interval between these two battles our poet had produced many plays, and several times won the prize; and a few years after the battle of Salamis he wrote the "Persians," a tragedy founded on that event, and representing the tragical end of Xerxes as brought on him by his overweening confidence and pride. In some other plays as well as in this—in "The Seven against Thebes," for instance, and the "Eumenides"—Æschylus treated political subjects directly or indirectly, and inculcated a conservative policy which should not seek through violence the aggrandisement of the state, nor carelessly change her venerable institutions. But in Athens at that time all was progress. Æschylus had neither the taste nor the opinions which would tend to make a man popular there. Discouraged perhaps by the changes effected in the constitution, piqued at the success of younger men, and, in particular, of Sophocles, and annoyed by a charge of sacrilege which he was supposed to have incurred by disclosing on the stage some details of the Eleusinian mysteries, he left Athens in his old age, never to return.
He retired to the court of Hiero in Syracuse, where he had before been a frequent guest, and there, in the midst of a literary circle, with Pindar, Simonides, and Epicharmus, he passed the remainder of his life. Several plays he wrote during his stay there, and these were probably produced at Athens by the care of his friends. It is likely that his greatest work, the Story of Orestes, was among them. He died at Gela, in Sicily, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. The in-
