These were the precepts which taught Æschylus. We are apt to think of him only in his maturity, a fighter at Marathon, a seasoned warrior at Salamis, a poet of the post-Persian epoch. But his childhood fell in the time of the Pisistratidæ, and it is by no means idle to speculate on the influences which then encompassed him. The memory of Solon’s ethics and vocabulary he carried with him through life. Foreign poets also, attracted to Athens by the sons of Pisistratus, must have seemed to him important personages. Two of the “ten” lyric poets were at this time identified with the city. Anacreon, when Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, had no longer a home to offer him, was brought in triumph to Athens in a fifty-oared galley sent by Hipparchus. And Simonides of Ceos, who was to be the chief mouthpiece of liberated Greece, was well content to enjoy the patronage of the despot. Footnote 6: _Clouds_, 973, translated by Rogers. Æschylus was fifteen when Hippias was expelled. Hipparchus had been assassinated earlier, at one of the celebrations of the Panathenæa, by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, but their failure to dispose of both tyrants at one blow had caused them to be ignominiously put to death and their memory ignored. Now, in the new enthusiasm for freedom, they were hailed as liberators of their city. Their memory became a cult. Their statues were set up by the Agora, and the boy Æschylus, as each anniversary of their deed came around and the Panathenaic procession wound up to the Acropolis, must have been fired by the thought of them. At twenty-five he may have lustily joined in the new drinking song which, commemorating their deed, took the town by storm. It continued to be sung for centuries. To Aristophanes it was a hackneyed classic and part of his comic stock in trade. “In a wreath of myrtle I’ll wear my glaive, Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave, When the twain on Athena’s day Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay. “For aye shall your fame in the land be told, Harmodius and Aristogeiton bold, Who, striking the tyrant down, Made Athens a freeman’s town.”[7] Footnote 7: Callistratus, translated by Conington. For the complete song see Symonds, “Greek Poets,” chap. x.