The poet fell in with the change that had come over the spirit of his time. The generation of Æschylus—stout warriors who had fought at Marathon, and sturdy seamen who "knew nothing" (as Aristophanes said) "except to call for barley-cake, and shout 'yo-heave-ho'"—had been content to believe implicitly all that Homer and their poets had taught them; and seeing around them traces of some mysterious force whose agency and purpose they were powerless to explain, they made a god of this Necessity or Destiny, and called it Nemesis. She was, in truth, a jealous deity, causing the rich and prosperous to founder like a vessel on a sunken reef,[1] and in one short day changing their joy to sorrow,—striking them pitilessly down in the plenitude of their grandeur, as a child in mere wantonness strikes down the tallest poppies in the corn-field. It was in vain to attempt to coax or cajole this capricious power by tears or offerings. History had taught men the futility of such bribes. Polycrates had thrown his precious ring into the sea; Crœsus had filled the treasury of Delphi with his gold; but "no sacrifice or libation could save a man's soul from Death," and "on Death alone, of all divinities. Persuasion had no power."[2] And Herodotus, the most pious of historians, draws the obvious moral from the downfall of kings and the collapse of empires. "Envy," he says, "clings to all that mortal is. . . . Even a god cannot escape from Destiny."[3]
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INTRODUCTION.
9
