him in his infancy, and had called him to a poet's work, so that he spake as one inspired,[1] represented the fact that his genius, lofty as it was, was less trained and self-controlled than that of Sophocles, that there was in him less of conscious and deliberate art "Æschylos," the later of the two dramatists, was reported to have said, "does right, but does not know why he does it;"[2] and it might well be that to a mind so calm and self-possessed as that of Sophocles, there would seem something below the calm grandeur of tragedy in the loud groans and wailings of the Persæ, or the masks that frightened women into fits in the fifty Eumenides.[3]
In the year B.C. 468 the younger poet appeared as a competitor for the tragic prize against the older. This year and the occasion were alike memorable. Kimon, then in the height of his popularity, had returned from Skyros with the bones of Theseus, which the Pythian oracle had four years before commanded the Athenians to bring back as a condition of relief, after a time of pestilence or famine.[4] After some difficulty and delay, they were brought back with all imaginable pomp, and the people celebrated
- ↑ Pausan., i. 21. 3.
- ↑ Athen., Deipnos., i. 22.
- ↑ See the somewhat obscure passage from Plutarch, (De profectu in virt.) as quoted and discussed by Lessing.
- ↑ Plutarch. Cimon 8. Thes. 36. It is interesting to think of the picture of a plague-stricken city, in "Œdipus the King," (1–33, 168–185,) as rising either out of this calamity or the more famous plague at the commencement of the Peloponnesian war.
