Take into consideration also his art of juggling, when he says that by his embassy he wrested Byzantium from the hands of Philip, and that his eloquence led the Acarnanians to revolt, and struck dumb the Thebans.  He thinks, forsooth, that you have fallen to such a degree of weakness that he can persuade you that you have been entertaining Persuasion herself in your city, and not a vile slanderer.  And when at the conclusion of his argument he calls upon his partners in bribe-taking, then fancy that you see upon these steps, from which I now address you, the benefactors of your State arrayed against the insolence of those men.  Solon, who adorned our commonwealth with most noble laws, a man who loved wisdom, a worthy legislator, asking you in dignified and sober manner, as became his character, not to follow the pleading of Demosthenes rather than your oaths and laws.  Aristides, who assigned to the Greeks their tributes, to whose daughters after he had died the people gave portions—­imagine Aristides complaining bitterly at the insult to public justice, and asking if you are not ashamed that when your fathers banished Arthurias the Zelian, who brought gold from the Medes (although while he was sojourning in the city and a guest of the people of Athens they were scarce restrained from killing him, and by proclamation forbade him the city and any dominion the Athenians had power over), nevertheless that you are going to crown Demosthenes, who did not indeed bring gold from the Medes, but who received bribes and has them still in his possession.  And Themistocles and those who died at Marathon and at Plataea, and the very graves of your ancestors—­will they not cry out if you venture to grant a crown to one who confesses that he united with the barbarians against the Greeks?

And now, O earth and sun! virtue and intelligence! and thou, O genius of the humanities, who teachest us to judge between the noble and the ignoble, I have come to your succor and I have done.  If I have made my pleading with dignity and worthily, as I looked to the flagrant wrong which called it forth, I have spoken as I wished.  If I have done ill, it was as I was able.  Do you weigh well my words and all that is left unsaid, and vote in accordance with justice and the interests of the city!

AESCHYLUS

(B.C. 525-456)

BY JOHN WILLIAMS WHITE

The mightiest of Greek tragic poets was the son of Euphorion, an Athenian noble, and was born B.C. 525.  When he was a lad of eleven, the tyrant Hipparchus fell in a public street of Athens under the daggers of Harmodius and Aristogeiton.  Later, Aeschylus saw the family of tyrants, which for fifty years had ruled Attica with varying fortunes, banished from the land.  With a boy’s eager interest he followed the establishment of the Athenian democracy by Cleisthenes.  He grew to manhood in stirring times.  The new State was engaged in war with the powerful neighboring island of Aegina; on the eastern horizon was gathering the cloud that was to burst in storm at Marathon, Aeschylus was trained in that early school of Athenian greatness whose masters were Miltiades, Aristides, and Themistocles.