The _Women of Etna_ (Αἰτναῖαι) was produced in Sicily at the foundation of Hiero’s new city. In the _Men of Eleusis_ (Ἐλευσίνιοι) Æschylus dealt with the earliest struggle of Athens—the war with Eleusis, his own birth-place. More ambitious in its topic was the _Daughters of the Sun_ (Ἡλιάδες) which dealt with the fall of Phaethon. A pretty fragment alludes to that “bowl of the Sun” so brilliantly described by Mimnermus, in which the god travels back by night from West to East. It seems that the geographical enumerations prominent in the Prometheus-trilogy were found here also, tinged less with grimness and more with romance. In the _Thracian Women_ (Θρῇσσαι) Æschylus treated the same theme as Sophocles in the _Ajax_. It is significant that the death of the hero was announced by a messenger. Possibly, then, it was a desire for novelty which caused the younger playwright to diverge so strikingly from custom as to depict the actual suicide. The _Cabiri_ (Κάβειροι) was the first tragedy to portray men intoxicated. In the _Niobe_ (Νιόβη) occurred splendid lines quoted with approbation by Plato:— Close kin of heavenly powers, Men near to Zeus, who upon Ida’s peak Beneath the sky their Father’s altar serve, Their veins yet quickened with the blood of gods.[262] The _Philoctetes_ is the subject of an interesting essay by Dio Chrysostom.[263] All the three great tragedians wrote plays[264] of this name, and Dio offers a comparison. Naturally, but for us unfortunately, he assumes a knowledge of these works in his readers; still, certain facts emerge about the Æschylean work. Men of Lemnos—the island on which Philoctetes had been marooned—constituted the chorus. To them the hero narrated the story of his desertion by the Greeks, and his wretched life afterwards. Odysseus persuaded him to come and help the Greeks at Troy by a long recital of Hector’s victory and false reports of the death of Agamemnon and Odysseus. Neither Neoptolemus nor Heracles (important characters in Sophocles) seems to have been introduced by Æschylus. Dio comments on the style and characterization. The primitive grandeur of Æschylus, he remarks, the austerity of his thought and diction, appear appropriate to the spirit of tragedy and to the manners of the heroic age. Odysseus is indeed clever and crafty, but “far removed from present-day rascality”; in fact he seems “absolutely patriarchal when compared with the modern school”. That the play is named after one of the persons and not the chorus, leads one to attribute it to a comparatively late period in the poet’s life. Finally, the _Weighing of the Souls_ (Ψυχοστασία) is remarkable for the scene in Heaven, modelled upon a passage in the _Iliad_, where Zeus, with Thetis, mother of Achilles, on one hand, and Eos, mother of Memnon, on the other, weighed in a balance the souls or lives of the two heroes about to engage in fight before Troy. * * * * *