His valor in four battles had set him among the national heroes; he had been, in The Persians, the laureate of Salamis; by the sheer grandeur of his poetry he had won the prize thirteen times in succession.—­And by the bye, it is to the eternal credit of Athenian intelligence that Athens, at one hearing of those obscure, lofty and tremendous poems, should have appreciated them, and with enthusiasm.  Try to imagine Samson Agonistes put on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering the elite:—­and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and acting, the hero of the day.  That, despite Mr. Whistler and the Ten O’Clock—­seems really to have been the kind of thing that happened in Athens.  Tomides was there, with his companions—­ little Tomides, the mender of bad soles—­and intoxicated by the grand poetry; understanding it, and never finding it tedious;—­ poetry they had had no opportunity to study in advance, they understood and appreciated 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,"