Like so many another of his royal line, apparently a failure.  And indeed, a failure he was, so far as his Athens was concerned.  True, Athenian artistic judgment triumphed presently over the Athenian spite.  Though it was the rule that no successful play should be performed more than once, they decreed that ‘revivals’ of Aeschylus should always be in order.  And Aristophanes testifies to his lasting popularity—­when he shows little Tomides with a bad grouch over seeing a play by Theognis, when he had gone to the theater “expecting Aeschylus";—­and when he shows Aeschylus and Euripides winning, because his poetry had died with him, and so he had it there for a weapon—­whereas Aeschylus’s was still alive and on earth.  Yes; Athens took him again, and permanently, into favor:  took the poet, but not the Messenger and his message.  For she had gone on the wrong road in spite of him:  she had let the divine force, the influx of the human spirit which had come to her as her priceless cyclic opportunity, flow down from the high planes proper to it, on to the plane of imperialism and vulgar ambition; and his word had been spoken to the Greeks in vain—­as all Greek history and Karma since has been proclaiming.  But in sooth he was not merely for an age, but for all time; and his message, unlike Pindar’s whom all Greece worshiped, and far more than Homer’s or that of Sophocles—­is vital today.  Aeschylus, and Plato, and Socrates who speaks through Plato, and Pythagoras who speaks through all of them, are the Greeks whose voices are lifted forever for the Soul.

Even the political aspect of his message—­the only one I have touched on—­is vital.  It proclaims a truth that underlies all history:  one, I suspect, that remains for our Theosophical Movement to impress on the general world-consciousness so that wars may end:  namely, that the impulse of Nationalism is a holy thing, foundationed upon the human spirit:  a means designed by the Law for humanity’s salvation.  But like all spiritual forces, it must be kept pure and spiritual, or instead of saving, it will damn.  In its inception, it is vision of the Soul:  of the Racial or National Soul—­which is a divine light to lure us away from the plane of personality, to obliterate our distressing and private moods; to evoke the divine actor in us, and merge us in a consciousness vastly greater than out own.  But add to that saving truth this damning corolary:  I am better than thou; my race than thine; we have harvests to reap at your expense, and our rights may be your wrongs:—­and you have, though it appear not for awhile, fouled that stream from godhood:—­you have debased your nationalism and made it hellish.  Upon your ambitions and your strength, now in the time of your national flowering, you may win to your desire, if you will; because now the spirit is quickening the whole fiber of your national self; and the national will must become, under that pressure, almost irresistibly