Aeschylus, the eldest of the great Attic tragedians, the son of Euphorion, born at Eleusis in 525 B. C. (4th year of the 63d Olympiad), died in 456. He was of a noble family of the class of the Eupatridas, and it is probable that he traced his origin to Codrus, the last king of Athens; for among the life archons, who succeeded the kings, was an Aeschylus, in whose reign the Olympiads commenced. It is believed that his father was connected with the worship of Ceres; and he was probably himself accustomed from his youth to the spectacles of the Eleusinian mysteries, into which he was afterward initiated. A portion of these he seems to have described in a strange fragment from his drama of the Edoni, the remainder being lost, and he was accused of divulging their secrets in his tragedy of the Eumenides. Pau-sanias relates of him that Bacchus, of whose worship tragic and dithyrambic odes and spectacles formed a part, appeared to him in a vision - as he himself asserted - when he had fallen asleep in the fields one day, while he should have been watching the vines, and commanded him to write tragedy.

At the age of 25 he made his first attempt as a tragic poet; but the next shape in which we find him mentioned is that of a warrior, when, with his two brothers, Cy-nasgirus and Aminias, he received public honors for distinguished valor in the famous field of Marathon. Six years after that battle he gained his first tragic victory, and four years afterward again fought at Salamis, where his brother Aminias received the prize for the greatest courage, being the trierarch who sank the first Phoenician ship, as the poet himself has related in his Persos, although modestly refraining from mention of this hero's name. He again fought at Plataea, and eight years after this gained the prize for a trilogy, or series of three dramas presented at a single representation, of which the "Persians," the earliest of his extant works, was one. In the latter part of his life he was defeated by Simonides in an elegiac contest for the prize offered for the best elegy to the honor of those who fell at Marathon; but for many years he was esteemed the greatest of tragic poets, having composed, it is said, 70 dramas, 5 of which were satyric, the rest tragedies of the loftiest tone, and gained 13 tragic prizes before he was at length defeated by Sophocles, in 468. Soon after this, whether in disgust at this loss of his poetic laurels, or at a trial to which he is said to have been subjected on an accusation of impiety for the disclosure of the Eleusinian mysteries, as related above, he retired to Sicily, where he was hospitably received by Hiero, in whose honor he composed a drama styled the "Women of Etna"; and he died at Gela, in the 69th year of his age.

The real circumstances of his accusation and trial are unknown. Clemens Alexandrinus states that he was tried by the court of the Areopagus and acquitted; while Aelian relates that he would have been stoned to death by the Athenians, had not his brother Aminias awakened the sympathies of his would-be executioners by baring his mutilated arm, from which the hand had been hewn by a Persian scimitar as he was struggling to prevent the launch of a galley from the beach at Marathon. It is, moreover, doubtful whether he ever revisited his native country between the period of his expatriation and that of his death, although many of his pieces, among others the celebrated Oresteian trilogy, composed of the Agamemnon, the Choephori, and the Eumenides, which gained the tragic prize in 458, were performed during this period. The latter fact seems to disprove the whole story of the accusation of impiety as the cause of his taking umbrage toward Athens, as it certainly disposes of its connection with his removal to Sicily. Most doubtful of all is the received account of his death, which was occasioned, says the legend, by an eagle flying overhead with a tortoise in his claws, and dropping the reptile on the bald head of the poet, which he mistook for a stone. - Aeschylus was a great improver of the Attic tragedy; in fact, it is he who gave to it first the tragic form, by introducing a second performer, with dialogue, emotion, and action.

He also abridged the length of the dithyrambic odes, caused a regular stage to be erected, and was the first to produce his dramas with appropriate scenery and clothe his heroes in befitting costumes. Of his 70 dramas, but 7 have come down to us entire - the Seven against Thebes, the Suppliants, the Persians, the Prometheus Bound, the Agamemnon, the Choephori, and the Euraenides; with but a few fragments of the others. Aeschylus is undoubtedly the grandest, the stateliest, and the most solemn of the Attic tragedians; and his style, though difficult and at times rugged, is magnificently sonorous with its many-syllabled compounds. His creed is that of a blind, overruling, ever-present, inevitable necessity, against which it is vain to contend, from which it is hopeless to escape, yet which it is alike the duty and the glory of the great, good man to resist to the end undaunted; of ancestral guilt continually reproduced and punished by the successive guilt of generation after generation; of hapless kindred criminals, who would not be criminals could they avoid it, but are goaded on to the commission of ever new atrocities by the hereditary curse of the doomed race.

Such are the legends of the Theban Labdacidae and the Mycenian Atridae, predestined murderers, adulterers, and parricides,' inextricably involved in the dark net of necessity. It is objected to Aeschylus that he deals with horrors only; that his lyre has hut one chord of dark and disastrous terror; that he is all iron, and has no key with which to attune the tenderer strings of human sympathies. But it is doubtful whether there is to be found in the whole range of Greek letters deeper pathos than that of the woe of Prometheus, crucified on his Scythian crags for his love to mortals; than that of the choruses in the Agamemnon, descriptive of the disconsolate sorrow of Menelaus deserted by his faithless Helen; and of the sacrifice at the father's bidding of the devoted Iphigenia. Less polished, he is grander than both Sophocles and Euripides. - The tragedies of Aeschylus have been rendered into English verse by Dean Potter. A more poetical version is that of the Prometheus Bound, by Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The great trilogy, the Agamemnon, Choe-phori, and Eumenides, was translated (London, 1860) by Miss A. Swanwick, assisted by Mr. Francis Newman. In 1866 appeared Dean Milman's translation of the Agamemnon. The most esteemed editions of Aeschylus are by Schntz (Halle, 1808-'21), Dindorf (Leipsic, 1827, and Oxford, 18:32),,and Scholefield (Cambridge, 1830). Blomfield's edition is excellent as far as it is completed, but it contains only five of the seven tragedies that are still extant.