The Parian marble, more trustworthy than the discordant statements of ill-informed, or ill-transcribed lexicographers and scholiasts, enables us to fix the date of Æschylus, in the year 525 before Christ. Born an Athenian, in the deme of Eleusis, of an ancient and noble family, he had ample opportunity, by the contagion of the place, in his boyish days, of brooding over those lofty religious ideas which formed the characteristic inspiration of his drama,[f2] Pausanias (I. 21) relates of him that, on one occasion, when he was watching the vineyards as a mere boy, Dionysus appeared to him and ordered him to write dramas. Of this story, we may say that it either is true, literally, or invented to symbolize something that must have been true. The next authentic fact in the life of the poet, testified by Suidas, is that in his twenty-fifth year (499, B.C.), the same in which Sardes was burnt by the Ionians, he first appeared as a competitor for the tragic prize. But, as the strongest intellectual genius is often that which, like the oak, grows slowest, we do not find him registered as having actually gained the prize in such a competition till the lapse of sixteen years. Meanwhile, the soul of Greece had been called out at Marathon to prepare the world, as it were, for { 29} that brilliant display of self-dependence which was afterwards made at Salamis. At both these victories, which belonged to the world as much as to Greece, Æschylus was present, as also, according to some accounts, at Artemisium and Platæae--learning in all these encounters how much more noble it is to act poetry than to sing it, and borrowing from them certain high trumpet-notes of martial inspiration that stirred the soul deeper than any that could have been fetched from the fountains of Helicon, or the double peak of Parnassus. Braced in this best school of manhood, he continued his exertions as a dramatic poet, bringing gradually to firmness and maturity the dim broodings of his early years, till, in the year 484, according to the marble already quoted, he was publicly declared victor in that species of composition, of which, from the great improvement he made in it, he was afterwards to be celebrated as the father. In a few years after this, he, with his brother Ameinias, performed a distinguished part at the battle of Salamis; and this victory he eight years afterwards celebrated in his play of the PERSIANS, the earliest of his extant productions, of which the date is certainly known.[f3] The next mention that we find of the poet, among the few stray and comparatively unimportant notices that remain, is that some time between the year 478, that is, two years after the battle of Salamis, and the year 467, he paid a visit to Sicily, and along with Pindar, Bacchylides, Simonides, and other famous poets, was hospitably entertained by Hieron the famous tyrant of Syracuse. The two dates mentioned are those which mark the beginning and the end of the reign of that ruler; within which period, of course, the visit to Sicily must have taken place. Plutarch, in his life of Cimon (c. 8), connects Æschylus' departure for Sicily with the first tragic victory gained by the young Sophocles in the year preceding the death of Hiero; but it is possible that this precise date may have no other foundation than the story which attributed the Sicilian journey of the elder bard to his envy of the rising greatness of the younger; an instance of that sort of impertinence in which small wits constantly indulge when they busy themselves to assign motives for the actions of great ones. But the precise period is of small moment. When in Sicily, we are told { 30} that Æschylus re-exhibited his play of the Persians,[f4] and also wrote a play called the AETNEANS, to celebrate the foundation of the new city of Etna by his patron. This event, we are informed by Diodorus (xi. 49), took place in the year 476, a date which would require the presence of the poet in Sicily six years before the date mentioned by Plutarch. Connected with Sicily, there is worthy of mention also, in a life of Æschylus, the notable eruption of Etna, which took place in the year 479--the same in which the battle of Platæae took place[f5]--because there is a distinct allusion to this in the Prometheus Bound (p. 192), which enables us to say that this famous drama could not have been written before the forty-seventh year of the poet's life--that is to say, the full maturity of his powers.