oldest play whose date is certainly known. It was brought out in 472
B.C., eight years after the sea-fight of Salamis which it
commemorates, and five years before the _Seven against Thebes_
(467 B.C.). It is thought to be the second play of a Trilogy,
standing between the _Phineus_ and the _Glaucus_. Phineus was a
legendary seer, of the Argonautic era--"Tiresias and Phineus,
prophets old"--and the play named after him may have contained a
prophecy of the great conflict which is actually described in
_The Persae_: the plot of the _Glaucus_ is unknown. In any case,
_The Persians_ was produced before the eyes of a generation which
had seen the struggles, West against East, at Marathon and Thermopylae,
Salamis and Plataea. It is as though Shakespeare had commemorated,
through the lips of a Spanish survivor, in the ears of old
councillors of Philip the Second, the dispersal of the Armada.

Against the piteous want of manliness on the part of the returning
Xerxes, we may well set the grave and dignified patriotism of Atossa,
the Queen-mother of the Persian kingdom; the loyalty, in spite of
their bewilderment, of the aged men who form the Chorus; and, above
all, the royal phantom of Darius, evoked from the shadowland by the
libations of Atossa and by the appealing cries of the Chorus. The
latter, indeed, hardly dare to address the kingly ghost: but Atossa
bravely narrates to him the catastrophe, of which, in the lower world,
Darius has known nothing, though he realizes that disaster, soon or
late, is the lot of mortal power. As the tale is unrolled, a spirit
of prophecy possesses him, and he foretells the coming slaughter of
Plataea; then, with a last royal admonition that the defeated Xerxes
shall, on his return, be received with all ceremony and observance,
and with a characteristic warning to the aged men, that they must
take such pleasures as they may, in their waning years, he returns