Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/172

 152 .ESCHYLUS AESCULAPIUS where he was hospitably received by Hiero, in whose honor he composed a drama styled the " Women of Etna"; and he died at Gela, in the 69th year of his age. The real circum- stances of his accusation and trial are unknown. Clemens Alexandrinus states that he was tried by the court of the Areopagus and acquitted ; while ./Elian relates that he would have been stoned to death by the Athenians, had not his brother Aminias awakened the sympathies of his would-be executioners by baring his mu- tilated arm, from which the hand had been hewn by a Persian scimitar as he was strug- gling to prevent the launch of a galley from the beach at Marathon. It is, moreover, doubtful whether he ever revisited his native country between the period of his expatriation and that of his death, although many of his pieces, among others the celebrated Oresteian trilogy, com- posed of the Agamemnon, the Choephori, and the Eumenides, which gained the tragic prize in 458, were performed during this period. The latter fact seems to disprove the whole story of the accusation of impiety as the cause of his taking umbrage toward Athens, as it cer- tainly disposes of its connection with his re- moval to Sicily. Most doubtful of all is the received account of his death, which was occa- sioned, says the legend, by an eagle flying over- head with a tortoise in his claws, and dropping the reptile on the bald head of the poet, which he mistook for a stone. ./Eschylus was a great improver of the Attic tragedy ; in fact, it is he who gave to it first the tragic form, by intro- ducing a second performer, with dialogue, emo- tion, and action. He also abridged the length of the dithyrambic odes, caused a regular stage to be erected, and was the first to pro- duce his dramas with appropriate scenery and clothe his heroes in befitting costumes. Of his 70 dramas, but 7 have come down to us entire the Seven against Thebes, the Suppliants, the Persians, the Prometheus Bound, the Aga- memnon, the Choephori, and the Eumenides; with but a few fragments of the others. ^Eschylns is undoubtedly the grandest, the stateliest, and the most solemn of the Attic tragedians ; and his style, though difficult and at times rugged, is magnificently sonorous with its many-syllabled compounds. His creed is that of a blind, overruling, ever-present, inevi- table necessity, against which it is vain to con- tend, from which it is hopeless to escape, yet which it is alike the duty and the glory of the great, good man to resist to the end undaunted ; of ancestral guilt continually reproduced and punished by the successive guilt of generation after generation ; of hapless kindred criminals, who would not be criminals could they avoid it, but are goaded on to the commission of ever new atrocities by the hereditary curse of the doomed race. Such are the legends of the Theban Labdacidae and the Mycenian Atridne, predestined murderers, adulterers, and parri- cides, inextricably involved in the dark net of necessity. It is objected to ^Eschylus that he deals with horrors only ; that his lyre has but one chord of dark and disastrous terror ; that he is all iron, and has no key with which to at- tune the tenderer strings of human sympathies. But it is doubtful whether there is to be found in the whole range of Greek letters deeper pathos than that of the woe of Prome- theus, crucified on his Scythian crags for his love to mortals ; than that of the choruses in the Agamemnon, descriptive of the disconsolate sorrow of Menelaus deserted by his faithless Helen ; and of the sacrifice at the father's bid- ding of the devoted Iphigenia. Less polished, he is grander than both Sophocles and Euripi- des. The tragedies of JSschylus have been rendered into English verse by Dean Potter. A more poetical version is that of the Prome- theus Bound, by Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Brown- ing. The great trilogy, the Agamemnon, Choe- phori, and Eumenides, was translated (London, 1865) by Miss A. Swan wick, assisted by Mr. Francis Newman. In 1866 appeared Dean Milman's translation of the Agamemnon. The most esteemed editions of ^Eschylus are by Schutz (Halle, 1808-'21), Dindorf (Leipsic, 1827, and Oxford, 1832), and Scholefield (Cam- bridge, 1830). Blomfield's edition is excellent as far as it is completed, but it contains only five of the seven tragedies that are still extant. SCFLAPIUS (Gr. 'A^y^c), in Greek my- thology, the god of medicine and the patron of physicians. In the Homeric poems he is only spoken of as the "blameless physician," whose sons were serving in the Greek army before Troy. The most common story makes him the son of Apollo. He went about healing diseases and raising the dead to life. Pluto, god of Hades, took alarm at the latter exploit, and complained to Zeus, who struck ^Esculapius dead with a flash of lightning. The most re- nowned seat of ^Esculapius's worship in Greece was Epidaurus, in Argolis. He had a splendid temple there, with a statue half as large as that of Zeus Olympius at Athens. The cock was commonly sacrified to him, but the serpent was his favorite type. At Epidaurus a peculiar breed of holy serpents were kept about the temple, and into them the god was supposed to insinuate himself. When a city was afflicted with a pestilence, it used to send to Epidaurus for one of these ^Esculapian snakes, out of the sale of which the Epidaurian priests reaped large profits. The presence of the god in the pest-stricken city, in the form of a yellowish- brown snake, was held to be propitious, and likely to allay the rage of the pest. About 400 B. C. the Romans, under the pressure of ca- lamity, sent a solemn embassy to request the presence of one of these representatives of ^Esculapius. On a later occasion of the same nature (293 B. C.) the worship of ^Esculapius was introduced into Rome. There were also famous temples erected in his honor at Cos, Cnidos, and Rhodes. In all these temples were tablets commemorating wonderful cures, on which were recorded the name and genealogy