experts, for regarding the "Suppliant Maidens" with special interest. It is in all probability the earliest extant specimen of the drama. We see in it not only the dawn of the poetic genius of Æschylus, but of the drama of Greece, as distinct from mere Dionysiac choruses: the dawn of that species of poetry which, from its power of impressing a crowd no less than a solitary reader, has never, since the days of Æschylus, ceased to be the most potent instrument of ideas.
In speaking thus, however, we must not ignore the divergence between Boeckh, Müller, and others, on the one hand, and Hermann, Paley, etc., on the other, with respect to the date of this drama. The former set of critics find, in certain passages, allusion to the events of the year 461 B.C.; in which case the "Suppliant Maidens" dates as the middle, not the first, of Æschylus' surviving plays, being preceded by the "Prometheus," the "Persians," and the "Seven against Thebes," and followed by the "Agamemnon," "Choephoroi," and "Eumenides."
Hermann and Paley, however, regard it as a youthful work, anterior to the other six plays (see M. Haupt's Preface to Hermann's Æsch., vol. I. p. 3; Paley, Æsch., p. 2; etc.) In such a conflict of the learned, any one who has been compelled to form some opinion may be allowed to express it, provided he does so without confidence.
After scrutinizing the supposed allusions to the events of 461 B.C., I own myself unable to see in them more than a vague applicability to those events. They indicate rather the prescience of a poet and political thinker, than the experiences of a contemporary writer.
On the other hand, the internal evidence for the juvenility of this drama appears to me most cogent. We see the tendency to grandiose language, not yet fully developed as in the "Prometheus" and the "Seven against Thebes:" we see the dialogue just taking its place beside the chorus as equal, not yet as superior: we see the tendency of youth to simplicity, and even platitude, in religious and moral speculation; and yet we recognize (ll. 590–600), as in the germ, the profound theology of the "Agamemnon," and (ll. 697–709) the political vein of the "Eumenides." A gulf seems fixed between the "Suppliant Maidens" and the Trilogy, which can only be spanned by the supposition of a considerable interval of time. The opposite view has that difficulty, that element of the surprising, which we should feel if told that the "Merchant of Venice" belonged to the same period of Shakespeare's development as "Hamlet." There is little drawing of character in the "Suppliant Maidens;" nothing comparable to the "Prometheus" in force; nothing of the epical magnificence of the
