. have regarded himwith ill will. The well-known story of hisdeath, that an eagle, mistaking the poetsbald head for a stone, dropped a tortoise onit to break the shell, is represented on a gem,which Baumeister thinks was copied from arelief, and suggests that the story came fromthe relief and was fitted on to was held to fulfil an oracle by which Aes-chylus was to die by a blow from heaven.—Aeschylus so changed the system of thetragic stage that he has more claim thananyone else to be regarded as the founderof Tragedy. H
. have regarded himwith ill will. The well-known story of hisdeath, that an eagle, mistaking the poetsbald head for a stone, dropped a tortoise onit to break the shell, is represented on a gem,which Baumeister thinks was copied from arelief, and suggests that the story came fromthe relief and was fitted on to was held to fulfil an oracle by which Aes-chylus was to die by a blow from heaven.—Aeschylus so changed the system of thetragic stage that he has more claim thananyone else to be regarded as the founderof Tragedy. His great change consisted inintroducing a second actor, which was donecertainly before the Persae. Before this therecan have been little real dramatic action anda dialogue merely between the single actorand the chorus was of far less importancethan the classic odes. Aeschylus first madethe dialogue more important than the improved the masks and the costumesgenerally (see Diet. Antiq. Tragoedia):it was said (Athen. p. 21, e.) that he in some. Aeschylus. (From a gem AESIS degree imitated the splendid dress of thehierophant in the Eleusinian mysteries. It isstated by Vitruvius that Aeschylus first em-ployed Agatharchus to paint scenes : it is notquite easy to reconcile this with Aristotle, , 16, where ffurivoypafyla. is mentioned as in-troduced by Sophocles. It is possible thatAeschylus first used it in a still ruder form, andthat Sophocles so far developed it as to make ithis own. The characteristics of the plays ofAeschylus are a sublimity and grandeur offeeling and expression, with less of the pathoswhich we find in Sophocles and is his most pathetic play, butwe are made to feel that Prometheus is adeity and removed above mere human poet brings before us more forcibly, andmore terribly, than the other tragedians theunseen powers working out the doctrine of re-tributive justice, and the mysteries of lawswhich control even the
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