Æschylus, whose mind was heated to its highest glow by the common Greek effort against Persia and thenceforth kept the impress of that time, was through life democratic just so far as Athens was democratic at the end of the Persian Wars. On the one hand, he shared the sense of civic equality created by common labours and perils. On the other hand, he held to the old religion of Greece and Athens, to the family traditions bound up with it and to the constitutional forms consecrated by both. His greatest trilogy, the Oresteia, marks the end of the first period just defined; and its third play, the "Eumenides," is a symbol of his political creed. On the one hand, it exalts Theseus, peculiarly the hero of the democracy; on the other, it protests against the withdrawal of a moral censorship from the Areiopagus.
Euripides, in the last third of the century, is a democrat living under a democracy which disappointed his theory. His constant praise of the farmer-class is meaning; he liked them because they were the citizens who had least to do with the violence of the ecclesia. It was the sense of this violence—the hopeless bane, as he thought it, of the democracy—which hindered him from having a thorough interest in the public affairs of the city and from drawing any vigorous or continuous life for his poetry from that source. It was natural that he should have been one of the literary men who towards the end of the war emigrated from Athens to Macedonia. The strain of social criticism, often
