function cannot be adequately fulfilled until time enough has elapsed to distinguish permanent effects from those which were transient, and to enable the observer, freed from the obstructions of temporary passion, to award praise and blame with justice.
With these considerations before us, we may say that Æschylus could not have produced his drama of "The Persians" earlier, without losing something of unity and certainty, and something of that distance, or half-unreality, which constitutes the characteristic charm of the Athenian tragedy.
Knowing how essential this distance from common life—this "removedness" of the scene and action—is, we shall rather wonder that the poets did not entirely avoid subjects taken from recent history, and confine themselves to
"Presenting Thebes and Pelops' line,
Or the tale of Troy divine."
And in fact the cases in which they did leave the mythological cycle were exceptional, and perhaps not often successful; though the pre-eminent importance of the Persian war made success possible here. An early contemporary of Æschylus, Phrynichus, had many years before made a great mistake by his injudicious choice of such a subject—one connected with this very Persian war itself. The war originated, as the reader will remember, in the feuds between the Persians and the Ionian colonies in Asia Minor, of which Miletus was chief These cities had attempted to throw off the yoke of the Persians, who had long
