show the great excellence to which he attained.  He was so celebrated that he was employed by the different States and princes of Greece to compose choral songs for special occasions, especially for the public games.  Although a Theban, he was held in the highest estimation by the Athenians, and was courted by kings and princes.  Born in Thebes 522 B.C., he died probably in his eightieth year, being contemporary with Aeschylus and the battle of Marathon.  We possess also fragments of Sappho, Simonides, Anacreon, and others, enough to show that could the lyrical poetry of Greece be recovered, we should probably possess the richest collection that the world has produced.

Greek dramatic poetry was still more varied and remarkable.  Even the great masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides now extant were regarded by their contemporaries as inferior to many other Greek tragedies utterly unknown to us.  The great creator of the Greek drama was Aeschylus, born at Eleusis 525 B.C.  It was not till the age of forty-one that he gained his first prize.  Sixteen years afterward, defeated by Sophocles, he quitted Athens in disgust and went to the court of Hiero, king of Syracuse.  But he was always held, even at Athens, in the highest honor, and his pieces were frequently reproduced upon the stage.  It was not so much the object of Aeschylus to amuse an audience as to instruct and elevate it.  He combined religious feeling with lofty moral sentiment, and had unrivalled power over the realm of astonishment and terror.  “At his summons,” says Sir Walter Scott, “the mysterious and tremendous volume of destiny, in which is inscribed the doom of gods and men, seemed to display its leaves of iron before the appalled spectators; the more than mortal voices of Deities, Titans, and departed heroes were heard in awful conference; heaven bowed, and its divinities descended; earth yawned, and gave up the pale spectres of the dead and yet more undefined and ghastly forms of those infernal deities who struck horror into the gods themselves.”  His imagination dwells in the loftiest regions of the old mythology of Greece; his tone is always pure and moral, though stern and harsh; he appeals to the most violent passions, and is full of the boldest metaphors.  In sublimity Aeschylus has never been surpassed.  He was in poetry what Phidias and Michael Angelo were in art.  The critics say that his sublimity of diction is sometimes carried to an extreme, so that his language becomes inflated.  His characters, like his sentiments, were sublime,—­they were gods and heroes of colossal magnitude.  His religious views were Homeric, and he sought to animate his countrymen to deeds of glory, as it became one of the generals who fought at Marathon to do.  He was an unconscious genius, and worked like Homer without a knowledge of artistic laws.  He was proud and impatient, and his poetry was religious rather than moral.  He wrote seventy plays, of which only seven are extant; but these are immortal, among the greatest creations of human genius, like the dramas of Shakspeare.  He died in Sicily, in the sixty-ninth year of his age.