Of the second portion of the Trilogy we can only speak conjecturally. There is a passage in the _Prometheus Bound_ (ll. 860-69), in which we learn that the maidens were somehow reclaimed by the suitors, and that all, except one, slew their bridegrooms on the wedding night. There is a faint trace, among the Fragments of Aeschylus, of a play called _Thalamopoioi_,—i.e. _The Preparers of the Chamber_,—which may well have referred to this tragic scene. Its grim title will recall to all classical readers the magnificent, though terrible, version of the legend, in the final stanzas of the eleventh poem in the third book of Horace’s _Odes_. The final play was probably called _The Danaides_, and described the acquittal of the brides through some intervention of Aphrodite: a fragment of it survives, in which the goddess appears to be pleading her special prerogative. The legends which commit the daughters of Danaus to an eternal penalty in Hades are, apparently, of later origin. Homer is silent on any such penalty; and Pindar, Aeschylus’ contemporary, actually describes the once suppliant maidens as honourably enthroned (_Pyth_. ix. 112: _Nem_. x. ll. 1-10). The Tartarean part of the story is, in fact, post-Aeschylean. _The Suppliant Maidens_ is full of charm, though the text of the part which describes the arrival of the pursuers at Argos is full of uncertainties. It remains a fine, though archaic, poem, with this special claim on our interest, that it is, probably, the earliest extant poetic drama. We see in it the _tendency_ to grandiose language, not yet fully developed as in the _Prometheus_: the inclination of youth to simplicity, and even platitude, in religious and general speculation: and yet we recognize, as in the germ, the profound theology of the _Agamemnon_, and a touch of the political vein which appears more fully in the _Furies_. If the precedence in time here ascribed to it is correct, the play is perhaps worth more recognition than it has received from the countrymen of Shakespeare. _The Persians_ has been placed second in this volume, as the oldest play whose date is certainly known. It was brought out in 472 B.C., eight years after the sea-fight of Salamis which it commemorates, and five years before the _Seven against Thebes_ (467 B.C.). It is thought to be the second play of a Trilogy, standing between the _Phineus_ and the _Glaucus_. Phineus was a legendary seer, of the Argonautic era—“Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old”—and the play named after him may have contained a prophecy of the great conflict which is actually described in _The Persae_: the plot of the _Glaucus_ is unknown. In any case, _The Persians_ was produced before the eyes of a generation which had seen the struggles, West against East, at Marathon and Thermopylæ, Salamis and Plataea. It is as though Shakespeare had commemorated, through the lips of a Spanish survivor, in the ears of old councillors of Philip the Second, the dispersal of the Armada.