by the rise of Athens to voyages of discovery and trade adventure. Of our extant plays, the Prometheus is full of mere declamations on saga-geography; the Persæ comes next, then the Suppliants; and even the Agamemnon has the account of the beacon stations. Glaucus of the Sea,* Niobe,* and probably the Mysians,* were full of the same thing. The impulse did not last in Greek tragedy. Sophocles has his well-known burst of Herodotean quotation, and he likes geographical epithets as a form of ornament, but he keeps his interest in 'historiê' within due limits. Euripides, so keenly alive to all other branches of knowledge, is quite indifferent to this.
In the choice of subjects Æschylus has a certain preference for something superhuman or unearthly, which combines curiously with this geographical interest. The Prometheus begins with the words: "Lo, we are come to the farthest verge of the world, to where the Scythians wander, an unearthly desolation!." That is the region where Æschylus is at home, and his 'large utterance' natural and unhampered. Many of his lost plays move in that realm which Sophocles only speaks of, among
"The last peaks of the worlds beyond all seas,
Well-springs of night and gleams of opened heaven,
The old garden of the Sun."[1]
It is the scene of the Daughters of the Sun,* treating of the fall of Phaëthon; of the Soul-Weighing,* where Zeus balances the fates of Hector and Achilles; of the Ixîon;* of the Memnon;* and the numerous plays on Dionysiac subjects show the same spirit.
It is partly the infancy of the art and partly the intensity of Æschylus's genius that makes him often choose subjects that have apparently no plot at all, like our
- ↑ Soph. frag. 870.
