ry,
song, and dance--the poet contributed; and we gain a new sense of the
force of the word "poet" (it means "creator"), when we contemplate his
triple function. Moreover, he often "staged" the play himself, and
sometimes he acted in it. Aeschylus was singularly successful in an age
that produced many great poets. He took the first prize at least
thirteen times; and as he brought out four plays at each contest, more
than half his plays were adjudged by his contemporaries to be of the
highest quality. After the poet's death, plays which he had written, but
which had not been acted in his lifetime, were brought out by his sons
and a nephew. It is on record that his son Euphorion took the first
prize four times with plays of his father; so the poet's art lived after
him and suffered no eclipse.

Only seven complete plays of Aeschylus are still extant. The best
present source of the text of these is a manuscript preserved in the
Laurentian Library, at Florence in Italy, which was written in the tenth
or eleventh century after Christ. The number of plays still extant is
small, but fortunately, among them is the only complete Greek trilogy
that we possess, and luckily also the other four serve to mark
successive stages in the poet's artistic development. The trilogy of the
'Oresteia' is certainly his masterpiece; in some of the other plays he
is clearly seen to be still bound by the limitations which hampered the
earlier writers of Greek tragedy. In the following analysis the seven
plays will be presented in their probable chronological order.

The Greeks signally defeated Xerxes in the great sea fight in the bay of
Salamis, B.C. 480. The poet made this victory the theme of his
'Persians.' This is the only historical Greek tragedy which we now
possess: the subjects of all the rest are drawn from mythology. But
Aeschylus had a model for his historical play in the 'Phoenician Women'
of his predecessor Phrynichus, which dealt with the same theme.
Aeschylus, indeed, is said to have imitated it closely in the
'Persians.' Plagiarism was thought to be a venial fault by the ancients,
just as in the Homeric times piracy was not considered a disgrace. The
scene of the play is not Athens, as one might expect, but Susa. It opens
without set prologue. The Chorus consists of Persian elders, to whom the
government of the country has been committed in the absence of the King.
These venerable men gather in front of the royal palace, and thei