into
exile for ten years.

Cynegyrus, the man whose hands had been cut off in the bay of Marathon,
had a very famous brother named AEschylus--quite as brave a soldier, and
a poet besides. The Athenians had come to worshipping Bacchus, but not
in the horrid, mad, drunken manner of the first orgies. They had songs
and dances by persons with their heads wreathed in vine and ivy leaves,
and a goat was sacrificed in the midst. The Greek word for a goat is
_tragos_, and the dances came to be called tragedies. Then came in the
custom of having poetical speeches in the midst of the dances, made in
the person of some old hero or god, and these always took place in a
curve in the side of a hill, so worked out by art that the rock was cut
into galleries, for half-circles of spectators to sit one above the
other, while the dancers and speakers were on the flat space at the
bottom. Thespis, whom Solon reproved for falsehoods, was the first
person who made the dancers and singers, who were called the chorus, so
answer one another and the speakers that the tragedy became a play,
representing some great action of old. The actors had to wear brazen
masks and tall buskins, or no one could have well seen or heard them.
AEschylus, when a little boy, was set to watch the grapes in his father's
vineyard. He fell asleep, and dreamt that Bacchus appeared to him, and
bade him make his festivals noble with tragedies; and this he certainly
did, for the poetry he wrote for them is some of the grandest that man
ever sung, and shows us how these great Greeks were longing and feeling
after the truth, like blind men groping in the dark. The custom was to
have three grave plays or tragedies on the same subject on three
successive days, and then to finish with a droll one, or comedy, as it
was called, in honour of the god Comus. There is one trilogy of
AEschylus still preserved to us, where we have the death of Agamemnon,
the vengeance of Orestes, and his expiation when pursued by the Furies,
but the comedy belonging to them is lost.

Almost all the greatest and best Greeks of this time believed in part in
the philosophy of Pythagoras, who had lived in the former century, and
taught that the whole universe was one great divine musical instrument,
as it were, in which stars, sun, winds, and earth did their part, and
that man ought to join himself into the same sweet harmony. He thought
that if a man did ill his spirit went into some animal, a