Tragedy, like the epic before it, and the comedy which followed it, reflects the age in which it was born: just as we get snowdrops in the spring, roses in the summer, and berries in the autumn. King’s courts were by this time abolished and the crowd of citizens had to have their entertainments. At the same time a deeper religious mood passed over Greece, and in Aeschylus (born 523 B. C.) this came to inspire tragic poetry which is artistically magnificent. There was an old custom of having, on the festival of Dionysos, the god of dance and wine, a group of men quaintly dressed who danced round his altar chanting old verses. Out of this the poets created the play, and Athens built the first great theater. Aeschylus used ancient legends of tragic happenings that seemed to have a profound and somber moral significance. Only seven of his seventy tragedies have been preserved, and as Sir Gilbert Murray has in recent years superbly translated three of the best of these (_Agamemnon_, _Cheophori_, _Eumenides_) an English reader can get a very good idea of his tragic grandeur. These three plays form a trilogy, or connected series, founded on the terrible legend of the curse on the house of King Agamemnon. Behind it all Aeschylus sees the action of a great mysterious principle, Fate, greater than the gods, which brings the punishment of crime. “Eumenides” means the “Avenging Fates.” _Prometheus Bound_, from which Shelley took the title of his great “lyrical drama,” _Prometheus Unbound_, is another masterpiece of this “father of tragedy.” His rival and successor Sophocles (495-405) is considered even greater: indeed, the greatest tragic poet of all time. In fact there are experts who regard some of the masterpieces of Sophocles, such as the _Antigone_ (which ought to be read in one of the current translations), _Oedipus the King_, and _Electra_, as the finest works that were ever written. The theme of them is, as in Aeschylus, that a semi-divine Fate rules gods and men and avenges crime. Both tragedians take crime on the grand scale--murder, rape, incest, etc., in the legends of the old royal families--and the characters they create will live forever. Sophocles, of whose one hundred and thirteen plays we have only seven, is a little less somber, more humane, more polished than Aeschylus. He creates tragic grandeur out of the moral and religious feelings of the time.