_Ten O'Clock_--seems really to have been the kind of thing that
happened in Athens. Tomides was there, with his companions--
little Tomides, the mender of bad soles--and intoxicated by the
grand poetry; understanding it, and never finding it tedious;--
poetry they had had no opportunity to study in advance, they
understood and appreciated wildly at first hearing. One cannot
imagine it among moderns.--And Milton is clear as daylight beside
remote and difficult Aeschylus. To catch the latter's thought, we
need the quiet of the study, close attention, reading and
re-reading; and though of course time has made him more difficult;
and we should have understood him better, with no more than our
present limited intelligence, had we been his countrymen and
contemporaries; yet it remains a standing marvel, and witness to
the far higher general intelligence of the men of Athens. The
human spirit was immensely nearer this plane; they were far more
civilized, in respect to mental culture, than we are. Why?--The
cycles have traveled downward; our triumphs are on a more brutal
plane; we are much farther from the light of the Mysteries than
they were.

And yet they were going wrong: the great cycle had begun
its down-trend; they were already preparing the way for our
fool-headed materialism. In the _Seven against Thebes_ Aeschylus
protested against the current of the age. Three years later,
Athens, impatient of criticism, turned on him.

He is acting in one of his own plays--one that been lost. He
gives utterance, down there in the arena, to certain words--
tremendous words, as always, we must suppose: words hurled out of
the heights of an angry eternity--