habitants of Gela gave him a splendid funeral, and inscribed his own epitaph upon his tomb:—
"This tomb the dust of Æschylus doth hide,
Euphorion's son, and fruitful Gela's pride:
How tried his valour Marathon may tell,
And long-haired Medes who know it all too well."[1]
Not much is known of his life; indeed the few facts mentioned here form the greater part of what we are told, but even these are at least enough to show in what great times he lived, and how wide was the range of his gigantic powers. The character which we should be led by his works and his life to attribute to him is supported by the contemporary testimony of Aristophanes, who caricatures him, but with marked respect, in his comedy of "The Frogs." He is represented there as proud and intolerant, but brave, noble, and dignified; given to big words and long pompous compounds, but not at all as frothy or empty of sound sense; as a sturdy representative of the genuine spirit of tragedy and of all that was best in the old Athenian temper; one of those "hearts of oak who had fought at Marathon," and, like the rest of these, a little slow to follow the times, but made of a solid stuff of which there was too little remaining.
Two things then, in particular, are to be noticed in Æschylus by the modern reader. First, the "many-sidedness" of which we have already spoken, by which he was a soldier-poet; and, secondly, the prominent part
- ↑ Translated by Professor Plumptre, to whom this chapter is very largely indebted throughout.
