race a woe insatiable. 
      But I, apart from all,
      Hold this my creed alone: 
      Ill deeds along bring forth offspring of ill
      Like to their parent stock.”

Needless to say the translation—­Dean Plumptre’s in the main—­ fails to bring out the force of the original.

We must remember that for his audiences the story he had to tell was not the important thing.  They knew it in advance; it was one of their familiar legends.  What they went to hear was Aeschylus’ treatment of it; his art, his poetry, his preaching.  That was what was new to them:  the thing for which their eyes and ears were open.  We go to the theater, as we read novels, for amusement; the Athenians went for aesthetic and religious ends.  So Aechylus had ready for him an efficient pulpit; and was not suspect for using it.  We like Movies shows because they are entertaining and exciting; the Athenian would have damned them because they are inartistic.

I said, he had a pulpit ready for him; yet, as nearly as such a statement can come to truth, it was he himself who invented the drama.  It was, remember, an age of transition:  things were passing out from the inner planes:  the Mysteries were losing their virtue.  The Egyptian Mysteries had been dramatic in character; the Eleusinian, which were very likely borrowed or copied or introduced from Egypt, were no doubt dramatic too.  Then there had been festivals among the rustics, chiefly in honor of Dionysos not altogether in his higher aspects, with rudimentary plays of a coarse buffoonish character.  By 499, in Athens, these had grown to something more important; in that year the wooden scaffolding of the theater in which they were given broke down under the spectators; and this led to the building of a new theater in stone.  It was in 499 Aeschylus first competed; the show was still very rudimentary in character.  Then he went off to Sicily; and came back with the idea conceived of Greek Tragedy as an artistic vehicle or expression—­and something more.  He taught the men who had at first defeated him, how to do their later and better work; and opened the way for all who came after, from Sophocles to Racine.  He took to sailing this new ship of the drama as near as he might to the shore-line of the Mysteries themselves;—­indeed, he did much more than this; for he infused into his plays that wine of divine life then to be found in its purity and vigor only or chiefly in the Pythagorean Brotherhood.—­And now as to this new art-form of his.

De Quincey, accepting the common idea that the Dionysian Theater was built to seat between thirty and forty thousand spectators (every free Athenian citizen), argues that the formative elements that made Greek Tragedy what it was were derived from these huge dimensions.  In such a vast building (he asks) how could you produce such a play as Hamlet?—­where the art of the actor shows itself in momentary changes of expression, small byplay that would be lost, and