Page:Four Plays of Aeschylus (1908) Morshead.djvu/16

viii the inclination of youth to simplicity, and even platitude, in religious and general speculation: and yet we recognize, as in the germ, the profound theology of the Agamemnon, and a touch of the political vein which appears more fully in the Furies. If the precedence in time here ascribed to it is correct, the play is perhaps worth more recognition than it has received from the countrymen of Shakespeare.

The Persians has been placed second in this volume, as the oldest play whose date is certainly known. It was brought out in 472 B.C., eight years after the sea-fight of Salamis which it commemorates, and five years before the Seven against Thebes (467 B.C.). It is thought to be the second play of a Trilogy, standing between the Phineus and the Glaucus. Phineus was a legendary seer, of the Argonautic era—"Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old"—and the play named after him may have contained a prophecy of the great conflict which is actually described in The Persae: the plot of the Glaucus is unknown. In any case, The Persians was produced before the eyes of a generation which had seen the struggles, West against East, at Marathon and Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea. It is as though Shakespeare had commemorated, through the lips of a Spanish survivor, in the ears of old councillors of Philip the Second, the dispersal of the Armada.

Against the piteous want of manliness on the part of the returning Xerxes, we may well set the grave and dignified patriotism of Atossa, the Queen-mother