Go to the life of such a man, if you want big clues as to the inner history of his age;—­the life of Aeschylus, I think, can interpret for us that of Athens.  There are times when the movement of the cycles is accelerated, and you can see the great wheel turning; this was one.  Aeschylus had proudly distinguished himself at Marathon; and Athens, as the highest honor she could do him for that, must have his portrait appear in the battle-picture painted for a memorial of the victory.  He fought, too, at Artemisium and Salamis; with equal distinction.  In 484 he won the first of thirteen annual successes in the dramatic competitions.  These were the years during which Athens was really playing the hero; the years of Aristides’ ascendency.  In 480 Xerxes burned the city; but the people fought on, great in faith.  In 479 came Plataea, Aeschylus again fighting.  Throughout this time, he, the Esotericist and Messenger of the Gods, was wholly at one with his Athens—­an Athens alive enough then to the higher things to recognize the voice of the highest when it spoke to her—­to award Aeschylus, year after year, the chief dramatic prize.  Then in 478 or 477 she found herself in a new position:  her heroism and intelligence had won their reward, and she was set at the head of Greece.  Six years later Aeschylus produced The Persians, the first of the seven extant out of the seventy or eighty plays he wrote; in it he is still absolutely the patriotic Athenian.  In 471 came the Seven against Thebes; from which drama, I think, we get a main current of light on the whole future history of Athens.

Two men, representing two forces, had guided the city during those decades.  On the one hand there was Aristides, called the Just—­inflexible, incorruptible, impersonal and generous; on the other, Themistocles—­precocious and wild as a boy; profligate as a youth and young man; ambitious, unscrupulous and cruel; a genius; a patriot; without moral sense.  The policy of Aristides, despite his so-called democratic reforms, was conservative; he persuaded Greece, by sound arguments, to the side of Athens:  he was for Athens doing her duty by Greece, and remaining content.  That of Themistocles was that she should aim at empire by any means:  should make herself a sea-power with a view to dominating the Greek world.  Oh, to begin with, doubtless with a view to holding back the Persians; and so far his policy was sane enough; but his was not the kind of mind in which an ambitious idea fails to develop in ambitious and greedy directions; and that of mastery of the seas was an idea that could not help developing fatally.  He had been banished for his corruption in 471; but he had set Athens on blue water, and bequeathed to her his policy.  Henceforward she was to make for supremacy, never counting the moral cost.  She attacked the islands at her pleasure, conquered them, and often treated the conquered with vile cruelty.  The Seven against Thebes was directed by Aeschylus against the Themistoclean, and in support of the Aristidean, policy.  Imperialistic ambitions, fast ripening in that third decade of the fifth century, were opposed by the Messenger of the Gods.