in Attic letters; though his old rivals Pratînas and Phrynichus, and their respective sons Aristias and Polyphradmon, among others, doubtless won prizes over his head from time to time, and, for all we know, deserved them. The earliest play we possess is the Suppliant-Women; the earliest of known date is the Persæ, which won the first prize in 472.
In 470 he was again in Syracuse, and again the reason is not stated, though we hear that he reproduced the Persæ there. In 468 he was beaten for the first time by the young Sophocles. The next year he was again victor with the Seven against Thebes. We do not know the year of his great Prometheus Trilogy, but it and the Lykurgeia* seem to have come after this. His last victory of all was the Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choëphoroi, and Eumenides) in 458. He was again in Sicily after this—the little men of the Decadence suggest that he was jealous of Sophocles's victory of ten years back!—and died suddenly at Gela in 456. His plays went in and out of fashion at Athens, and a certain party liked to use him chiefly as a stick for beating Euripides; but a special law was passed after his death for the reproduction of his tragedies, and he had settled into his definite place as a classic before the time of Plato. The celebrated bronze statue of him was made for the stone theatre built by Lycurgus about 330.
The epitaph he is said to have written for his tomb at Gela is characteristic: no word of his poetry; only two lines, after the necessary details of name and birthplace, telling how the "grove of Marathon can bear witness to his good soldierhood, and the long-haired Mede who felt it." It is very possible that the actual facing of death on that first great day remained with him as the supreme
