Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/227

Rh S M S I 209 no doubt, by the samo literary influence in the person of its ruler Hiero, that drew thither Bacchylides, Simonides, and other notable men of that rich epoch. There can, at the same time, be little doubt that one cause of his visits to that island may have been a want of sympathy as to political matters between him and the Athenian public; for while the Athenians, from the time of Cleisthenes (A.C. 510), had been advancing by rapid and decided steps to the full expansion of the democratic principle, it is evident, from some passages in his plays, especially from the whole tone and tendency of the Eumenides, that the political leanings of the poet of the Prometheus were towards aris tocracy, and that, in the days of Pericles, he foresaw, with a sorrowful fear, the ripeness of those democratic evils which within so short a period led Xenophon to seek a new fatherland in Sparta, and opened to the Macedonian a plain path to the sovereignty of Greece. But whatever may have have been his motives for retiring from the scene of so many literary triumphs (and the gossipers of ancient times have of course transmitted to us their pleasant in ventions on this point), it is certain that, in the year A.C. 456, two years after the representation of his great trilogy, the Orestiad, he died at Gela, in Sicily, in the sixty-ninth year of his age; and the people of Gela, rejoicing in his bones, as Eavenna does in those of the banished Dante, inscribed the following memorial on his tomb : &quot; Here ^Eschylus lies, from his Athenian home Remote, neath Gela s wheat-producing loam ; How brave in battle was Euphorion s son, The long-haired Mede can tell who fell at Marathon.&quot; And thus he lives among posterity, celebrated more as a patriot than as a poet; as if to witness to all times that the great world of books, with all its power, is but a small thing unless it be the reflection of a greater world of action. Of the seventy plays which an old biographer reports him to have composed, only seven remain, with a few fragments of little significance save to the keen eye of the professed philologist. These fragments, however, are sufficient to justify the high esteem in which he was held by the Athenian public, and by that greatest of all the great wits of a witty age and a witty people, Aristophanes. In the grand trilogy which exhibits, in three consecutive tragedies, the story of the murder of Agamemnon, and its moral sequences, we have a perfect specimen of what the Greek tragedy was to the Greeks, as at once a complex artistic machinery for the exhibition of national legend, and a grave pulpit for the preaching of important moral truths; nor could a more worthy founder than ^Eschylus of such a &quot; sacred opera&quot; be imagined. His imagination dwells habitually in the loftiest region of the stern old religious mythology of primeval Greece; his moral tone is pure, his character earnest and manly, and his strictly dramatic power (not withstanding the very imperfect form of the drama in his day), as exhibited more especially in the Agamemnon, in the Eumenides, and in some parts of the Prometheus, is such as none of his famous successors, least of all Euripides, could surpass. Of his other plays, the Seven against Thebes is a drama, as Aristophanes expressed it, &quot;full of war,&quot; and breathes in every line the spirit of the age and of the people that saved Europe from the grasp of oriental despotism; the Persians, though weak in some parts, con tains some fine choral poetry, and a description of the I attle of Salamis, that will belong to the poetry of the world so long as the -world lasts; while the Suppliants presents much in a tasteful translation that makes us lament the loss of the missing piece of the trilogy to which it belonged, no less than the blundering of the thoughtless copyists of the middle ages, by whose pen it has been so egregiously defaced. For in ancient times the flowing rhetorical Euripides was found a more useful model for the schools of eloquence than the lofty, stern, and sometimes harsh, and occasionally it may be obscure, ^Eschylus: therefore the text of the latter has been comparatively neglected, and much work was left for the tasteful philologist before many parts of his noblest choruses could be ren dered legible. Of the editions of ^schylus, the most notable in the earlier times of modern scholarship is that of Stanley; in more recent times, that of Schiitz, who undertook the work of restoration with much learning and great boldness. The impulse given by this scholar was moderated by Wellauer, who, in his edition, along with some happy emendations, principally endeavoured to vin dicate the authority of the manuscript readings from tho large license of conjectural critics; and noAv from the remains of the great Hermann has been published a text that should present the just medium between the timidity of Wellauer and the rashness of mere conjectural criticism, though it is much to be feared that the learned German has been not seldom led astray by the itch of emendation, which is the old besetting sin of critical scholarship. Of English poetical translations there are the old one by Potter, and recent ones by Blackie, Plumptre,audSwanwick. There is also a translation in literal prose by Buckley. ( j. s. B. ) AESCULAPIUS, in the Heathen Mythology, the god of medicine, was the son of Apollo and the nymph Coronis. He was educated by the centaur Chiron, who taught him the art of healing; and his skill enabled him to cure the most desperate diseases. But Jupiter, enraged at his restoring to life Hippolytus, who had been torn in pieces by his own horses, killed him with a thunderbolt. According to Cicero, there were three deities of this name : the first, the son of Apollo, worshipped in Arcadia, who invented the probe and bandages for wounds; the second, the brother of Mercury, who was killed by lightning; and the third, the son of Arsippus and Arsinoe, who was the first to teach tooth-drawing and purging. At Epidaurus, ^Esculapius s statue was of gold and ivory, with a long beard, the head surrounded with rays, a knotty stick in one hand, and the other entwined with a serpent : the figure was seated on a throne of the same materials as the statue, and had a dog lying at its feet. The Romans crowned him with laurel, to represent his descent from Apollo ; and the Phliasians represented him as beardless. The cock, the raven, and the goat were sacred to this deity. His chief temples were at Pergamos, Smyrna, Tricca, a city in Thes- saly, and the isle of Coos ; in all which places votive tablets were hung up, showing the names of those cured and the diseases of which they were healed by his assistance. But his most famous shrine was at Epidaurus, where, every five years, games were celebrated in his honour, nine days after the Isthmian games at Corinth. JESIR (plural of As, or Ass, god), the gods of the Northmen of Scandinavia and Iceland. There were twelve chief gods or JEsir besides Odin (the All-fa$ir, All- father), viz., Thor, Baldur, Nib rd, Frey, T^ or T$r, Bragi, Heimdal, Hod, Vidar, Ull, Forsetti, Loki or Lopt. The chief goddesses of ASGARD (q.v.), the Odinic Olympus, were Frigg, Freyia, Nanna, Sif, Saga, Hel, Gefion, Eir, Hlin, Lofn, Vor, Snotra. The names of the JEsir, con sidered in the primary old northern significance of the words, convey in most instances an allusion to their char acteristics; but it is impossible to decide whether they merely personify certain physical powers in nature, and abstract ideas of definite mental conditions, or whether they were originally borne by individuals connected with the pre-historic ages of the people. It is probable that the ideas underlying the myths connected with the ^Esir have a mixed origin, and may be referred to a blending of physical, material, and historical elements. Our know ledge of northern mythology has been derived principally I. - 27