Page:House of Atreus 2nd ed (1889).djvu/12

viii those given above, the tale of his death has been preserved for its striking singularity: it has the authority of story, and no more. To his familiarity with war, by land and sea, his surviving dramas bear the strongest witness. There is a priori likelihood, and intrinsic evidence, and some external testimony, of his having shared in one or more of the great battles which saved the western world. Nor does his departure from Athens—to whatever cause it was due—nor his residence, apparently on two separate occasions, in Sicily, admit of doubt. A vague statement that his poetry was inspired by wine—a portraiture of him by the pen of Aristophanes in the Frogs (intended, as, I am convinced, those of Euripides and Socrates by the same hand were intended, mainly as a literary portrait of the author and teacher, not a delineation of the man as he was); some notices from Aristotle of the improvements introduced by him into the arrangements of the dramatic stage: these, and a few others, form the whole of our scanty information respecting the life of Æschylus, son of Euphorion. Stat magni nominis umbra.

Of his works there remain to us seven dramas only, out of a very large number. Fragments or notices bring up the total to seventy-eight plays of which the titles are known. If we can judge of those we have not, in any degree, by those which we have,—and many of the fragments lead us towards such an estimate,—the chaos of lost things holds no equal treasure: but it is not now to be rescued; in his own words

Perhaps a list of the surviving dramas may be useful to those wishing to form an idea of the poet's scope and range.