poetico-dramatic fields); and to that song of his that "saved
at Salamis":

_"O Sons of Greeks, go set your country free!"_

--and he was acquitted: Athens had not yet fallen so low as to
prepare a hemlock cup for her teacher. But meanwhile he would do
much better among his old comrades in Sicily than at home; and
thither he went.

He returned in 458, to find the Age of Pericles in full swing;
with all made anew, or in the making; and the time definitely
set on its downward course. 'Reform' was busy at abolishing
institutions once held sacred; was the rage;--that funeral speech
of Pericles, with its tactless vaunting of Athenian superiority
to all other possible men and nations, should tell us something.
When folk get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!--it
is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in
the _Agamemnon_--the first play of this last of his trilogies;
and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the
_Eumenides_--where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened
Areopagus. Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he
returned to Sicily to die.

Like so many another of his royal line, apparently a failure.
And indeed, a failure he was, so far as his Athens was concerned.
True, Athenian artistic judgment triumphed presently over the
Athenian spite. Though it was the rule that no successful play
should be performed more than once, they decreed that 'revivals'
of Aeschylus should always be in order. And Aristophanes