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 ^ESCHINES years ago, under the presidency of the duke of Argyll. Absolutely nothing has been ac- complished by it yet except to organize a series of experiments on the relation be- tween the pressure and the velocity of air. See " Travels in the Air by James Glaisher, F. K. S., Oamille Flammarion, W. de Fonvielle, and Gaston Tissandier, edited by James Glai- sher, F. R. S." (London, 1871). KS( IIIM:S. I. An Athenian orator, rival of Demosthenes, horn at Athens in 389 B. C., died at Samos in 314. He was the son of Atro- metus and Glaucothea. Demosthenes says Atrometus was a freedman and Glaucothea a prostitute. ^Eschines, on the contrary, says his father was a true-born Athenian. Demos- thenes upbraided him with the fact that his father was a schoolmaster, as though it were a low and sordid occupation. ^Eschines was afterward clerk to a magistrate, and thus ob- tained some insight into the laws of his coun- try. He subsequently tried his fortune on the stage, served with distinction in the army, and finally appeared as an orator on the public arena. He was public clerk for two years, and a satellite of the orators Aristophon and Eubulus. In 347 he was sent, along with De- mosthenes, as one of the ten ambassadors to negotiate a peace with Philip of Macedon. From this time forth he favored the Macedo- nian alliance, and opposed the patriotic par- ty of Athens, headed by Demosthenes. He formed one of the embassy who went to receive Philip's oath to the treaty. Timarchus and Demosthenes accused him on his return of malversation. He evaded the danger by a counter prosecution against Timarchus, on ac- count of his bad moral character, which suc- ceeded. Shortly after the battle of Chseronea, in 338, Ctesiphon, an Athenian, proposed that Demosthenes should receive from the state a golden crown. ^Eschines indicted Ctesiphon for bringing forward an illegal and inappropri- ate resolution. The cause was not tried until 330, six years after the death of Philip, and when Alexander was in Asia. Ctesiphon was acquitted, and as .^Eschines had not gained one fifth of the aggregate votes cast, he was liable to pay the penalty inflicted by the Athenian law on him who brought forward a factious resolution. Being unable to pay this penalty, he retired to the island of Rhodes, where he taught elocution for a livelihood, and became the founder of the Rhodian school of oratory. Three speeches of his are extant, showing great narrative and descriptive power, and freer from personal abuse than those of Demos- thenes, who reluctantly acknowledged the mer- its of ^Eschines. The first is on malversation in his embassy, the second is against Timar- chus, and the third against Ctesiphon. II. An Athenian philosopher, a follower of Socrates, and the son of Charinus, a sausage maker. So- crates used to say that the sausage maker's son was the only man who knew how to honor him. Poverty obliged him to go to the court AESCHYLUS 151 of the younger Dionysius, the Syracusan tyrant, where Plato, then in the ascendant there, treated him with contempt, but Aristippus gave him a large reward for his dialogues. On his return from Sicily, he taught philosophy for a living at Athens, lie wrote orations for the forum for hire. Several dialogues on ethical subjects have been with doubtful jus- tice ascribed to him. JSSCHYLtS, the eldest of the great Attic trage- dians, the son of Euphorion, born at Eleusis in 525 B. C. (4th year of the 63d Olympiad), died in 456. He was of a noble family of the class of the Eupatrid, and it is probable that he traced his origin to Codrus, the last king of Athens ; for among the life archons, who succeeded the kings, was an ^Eschylus, in whose reign the Olympiads commenced. It is believed that his father was connected with the worship of Ceres; and he was probably himself accus- tomed from his youth to the spectacles of the Eleusinian mysteries, into which he was after- ward initiated. A portion of these he seems to have described in a strange fragment from his drama of the Edoni, the remainder being lost, and he was accused of divulging their se- crets in his tragedy of the Eumenides. Pau- sanias relates of him that Bacchus, of whose worship tragic and dithyrambic odes and spec- tacles formed a part, appeared to him in a vis- ion as he himself asserted when he had fallen asleep in the fields one day, vhile he should have been watching the vines, and commanded him to write tragedy. At the age of 25 he made his first attempt as a tragic poet; but the next shape in which we find him mentioned is that of a warrior, when, with his two brothers, Cy- naBgirus and Aminias, he received public honors for distinguished valor in the famous field of Marathon. Six years after that battle he gained his first tragic victory, and four years afterward again fought at Salamis, where his brother Aminias received the prize for the greatest courage, being the trierarch who sank the first Phoenician ship, as the poet himself has related in his Persa?, although modestly re- fraining from mention of this hero's name. He again fought at Plataaa, and eight years after this gained the prize for a trilogy, or series of three dramas presented at a single representa- tion, of which the " Persians," the earliest of his extant works, was one. In the latter part of his life he was defeated by Simonides in an elegiac contest for the prize offered for the best elegy to the honor of those who fell at Mara- thon ; but for many years he was esteemed the greatest of tragic poets, having composed, it is said, 70 dramas, 5 of which were satyric, the rest tragedies of the loftiest tone, and gained 13 tragic prizes before he was at length defeated by Sophocles, in 468. Soon after this, whether in disgust at this loss of his poet- ic laurels, or at a trial to which he is said to have been subjected on an accusation of impi- ety for the disclosure of the Eleusinian myste- ries, as related above, he retired to Sicily,