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xviii the partisans of Cylon) undoubtedly operated in his disfavour. (See Thucyd. Bk. i, ch. 127.)

The proportion of people who believe in an unjust, capricious, and vindictive God may have diminished since the time of Æschylus and Ezekiel: yet to this day so large a minority are haunted by corresponding ideas—so considerable even in our own time has been the political influence of such notions—that the earnest protest of the Hebrew prophet and the less distinct yet equally purified doctrine of the Athenian poet can neither of them be said to have lost their importance nor to have done their work. The eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel, and the third chorus of the Agamemnon, should be read together, as the grandest assertions, in pre-christian times, of the justice of God.

The poetry of Æschylus is the precursor of the philosophy of Plato: the vague and mysterious problems over which the poet brooded became the subjects of moral philosophy in the next generation. Let it be remembered that we have in Æschylus the beginnings of speculation, not its ultimate forms; and the greatness of this first step will be at once apparent. Æschylus deals especially with two popular theories: (i.) The doctrine of the jealousy of Heaven against human prosperity as such; (ii.) The doctrine above mentioned of the inheritance of evil in certain families.

The first, he may be said to deny. The teaching of Solon, as recorded and exemplified by Herodotus in the history of Croesus (Book i, ch. 30–33), "that the Divine Power is altogether jealous, and loves to trouble the estate of man," is confronted by Æschylus with the assertion of justice, not caprice, as ruling over man. That this conception brought the poet into collision with the popular ideas of Zeus, is manifest from the drama of Prometheus Vinctus (where, unfortunately, we have the problem without