to the shades. The play ends with the undignified reappearance of
Xerxes, and a melancholy procession into the palace of Susa. It was,
perhaps, inevitable that this close of the great drama should verge
on the farcical, and that the poltroonery of Xerxes should, in a
measure, obscure Aeschylus' generous portraiture of Atossa and Darius.
But his magnificent picture of the battle of Salamis is unequalled
in the poetic annals of naval war. No account of the flight of the
Armada, no record of Lepanto or Trafalgar, can be justly set beside
it. The Messenger might well, like Prospero, announce a tragedy by
one line--

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.

Five years after _The Persians_, in 467 B. C., the play which we
call the _Seven against Thebes_ was presented at Athens. It bears
now a title which Aeschylus can hardly have given to it for, though
the scene of the drama overlooks the region where the city of Thebes
afterwards came into being, yet, in the play itself, Thebes is
_never_ mentioned. The scene of action is the Cadmea, or Citadel
of Cadmus, and we know that, in Aeschylus' lifetime, that citadel
was no longer a mere fastness, but had so grown outwards and
enlarged itself that a new name, Thebes, was applied to the
collective city. (All this has been made abundantly clear by Dr.
Verrall in his Introduction to the _Seven against Thebes_, to which
every reader of the play itself will naturally and most profitably
refer.) In the time of Aeschylus, Thebes was, of course, a notable
city, his great contemporary Pindar was a citizen of it. But the
Thebes of Aeschylus' date is one thing, the fortress represented in
Aeschylus' play is quite another, and is never, by him, called Thebes.
That the play received, and retains, the name, _The Seven against