ciated wildly at first hearing. One cannot
imagine it among moderns.--And Milton is clear as daylight beside
remote and difficult Aeschylus. To catch the latter's thought, we
need the quiet of the study, close attention, reading and
re-reading; and though of course time has made him more difficult;
and we should have understood him better, with no more than our
present limited intelligence, had we been his countrymen and
contemporaries; yet it remains a standing marvel, and witness to
the far higher general intelligence of the men of Athens. The
human spirit was immensely nearer this plane; they were far more
civilized, in respect to mental culture, than we are. Why?--The
cycles have traveled downward; our triumphs are on a more brutal
plane; we are much farther from the light of the Mysteries than
they were.

And yet they were going wrong: the great cycle had begun
its down-trend; they were already preparing the way for our
fool-headed materialism. In the _Seven against Thebes_ Aeschylus
protested against the current of the age. Three years later,
Athens, impatient of criticism, turned on him.

He is acting in one of his own plays--one that been lost. He
gives utterance, down there in the arena, to certain words--
tremendous words, as always, we must suppose: words hurled out of
the heights of an angry eternity--

_"Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,"_

--and Athens, that used to thrill and go mad to such tones when
they proclaimed the godlike in her own soul and encouraged her to
grand aspirations--goes mad now in another sense. She has grown
used to hear warning in them, and something in alliance with her
own stifled conscience protesting against her wrong courses;
and such habituation rarely means acquiescence or soothed
complacency. Now she is smitten and stung to the quick. A yell
from the mob; uproar; from the tiers above tiers they butt,
lurch, lunge, pour forward and down: the tinkers and cobblers,
demagogs and demagoged: intent--yes--to kill. But he, having yet
something to say, takes refuge at the altar; and there even a
maddened mob dare not molest him. But the prize goes to a rising
star, young Sophocles; and presently the Gods' Messenger is
formally accused and tried for "Profanation of the Mysteries."

Revealing secrets pertaining to them, in fact. And now note this:
his defense is that he did not know that his lines revealed any
secret--was unaware that what he had said perta