Pericles they must have ceased to rule life.  Pythagoras—­born, probably, in the five-eighties—­had found it necessary, to obtain that with which spirituality might be reawakened, to travel and learn what he could in India, Egypt, Chaldaea, and, according to Porphyry and tradition, among the Druids in Gaul—­and very likely Britain, their acredited headquarters.  From these countries he brought home Theosophy to Greek Italy; and all this suggests that he—­and the race—­needed something that Eleusis could no longer give.  About the same time Buddha and the founder of Jainism in India, Laotse and Confucius in China, and as we have seen, probably also Zoroaster in Persia, all broke away from the Official Mysteries, more or less, to found Theosophical Movements of their own; —­which would indicate that, at least from the Tyrrhenian to the Yellow Sea, the Mysteries had, in that sixth century, ceased to be the efficient instrument of the White Lodge.  The substance of the Ancient Wisdom might remain in them; the energy was largely gone.

Pisistratus did marvels for Athens; lifting her out of obscurity to a position which should invite great souls to seek birth in her.  He died in 527; two years later a son was born to the Eupatrid Euphorion at Eleusis; and I have no doubt there was some such stir over the event, on Olympus or on Parnassus, as happened over a birth at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, and one in Florence in the May of 1265.  In 510, Hippias, grown cruel since the assassination of his brother, was driven out from an Athens already fomenting with the yeast of new things.  About that time this young Eleusinian Eupatrid was set to watch grapes ripening for the vintage, and fell asleep.  In his dream Dionysos, God of the Mysteries, appeared to him and bade him write tragedies for the Dionysian Festival.  On waking, he found himself endowed with genius:  beset inwardly with tremendous thoughts, and words to clothe them in; so that the work became as easy to him as if he had been trained to it for years.

He competed first in 499—­against Choerilos and Pratinas, older poets—­and was defeated; and soon afterwards sailed for Sicily, where he remained for seven years.  The dates of Pythagoras are surmised, not known; Plumptre, with a query, gives 497 for his death.  I wonder whether, in the last years of his life, that great Teacher met this young Aeschylus from Athens; whether the years the latter spent in Sicily on this his first visit there, were the due seven years of his Pythagorean probation and initiation?  “Veniat Aeschylus,” says Cicero, “non poeta solum, sed etiam Pythagoreus:  sic enim accepimus “;—­and we may accept it too; for that was the Theosophical Movement of the age; and he above all others, Pythagoras having died, was the great Theosophist.  They had the Eleusinian Mysteries at Athens, and Most of the prominent Athenians must have been initiated into them—­since that was the State Religion; but Aeschylus alone in Athens went through life clothed in the living power of Theosophy.