—­and Athens, that used to thrill and go mad to such tones when they proclaimed the godlike in her own soul and encouraged her to grand aspirations—­goes mad now in another sense.  She has grown used to hear warning in them, and something in alliance with her own stifled conscience protesting against her wrong courses; and such habituation rarely means acquiescence or soothed complacency.  Now she is smitten and stung to the quick.  A yell from the mob; uproar; from the tiers above tiers they butt, lurch, lunge, pour forward and down:  the tinkers and cobblers, demagogs and demagoged:  intent—­yes—­to kill.  But he, having yet something to say, takes refuge at the altar; and there even a maddened mob dare not molest him.  But the prize goes to a rising star, young Sophocles; and presently the Gods’ Messenger is formally accused and tried for “Profanation of the Mysteries.”

Revealing secrets pertaining to them, in fact.  And now note this:  his defense is that he did not know that his lines revealed any secret—­was unaware that what he had said pertained to the Mysteries.  Could he have urged such a plea, had it not been known he was uninitiated?  Could he have known the teachings, had he not been instructed in a school where they were known?  He, then, was an initiate of the Pythagoreans, the new Theosophical Movement upon the new method; not of Orthodox Eleusis, that had grown old and comatose rather, and had ceased to count.—­Well, the judges were something saner than the mob; memory turned again to what he had done at Marathon, what at Arternisium and Plataea; to his thirteen solid years of victory (national heroism on poetico-dramatic fields); and to that song of his that “saved at Salamis”: 

     "O Sons of Greeks, go set your country free!"

—­and he was acquitted:  Athens had not yet fallen so low as to prepare a hemlock cup for her teacher.  But meanwhile he would do much better among his old comrades in Sicily than at home; and thither he went.

He returned in 458, to find the Age of Pericles in full swing; with all made anew, or in the making; and the time definitely set on its downward course.  ‘Reform’ was busy at abolishing institutions once held sacred; was the rage;—­that funeral speech of Pericles, with its tactless vaunting of Athenian superiority to all other possible men and nations, should tell us something.  When folk get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!—­it is hard enough for mere men to.  Aeschylus smote at imperialism in the Agamemnon—­the first play of this last of his trilogies; and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the Eumenides—­where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened Areopagus.  Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he returned to Sicily to die.