In 468 B.C. Æschylus left Athens for the court of Hiero, the Syracusan prince, round which so many great men clustered. According to some, the unjust award of the tragic prize to Sophocles, for political reasons, was the cause of his going. The more probable account is that his exile followed a public accusation of impiety, for disclosing certain religious mysteries in one of his plays. The popular excitement ran high; the poet was attacked with stones, when his brother happily averted the fury of the mob by uncovering before them the stump of his own arm, which had been mutilated at Salamis in defence of his country. Hiero received our author hospitably; and the poet made return by writing for him a drama called “the Women of Etna.” Æschylus may have visited Athens after this; but if so, he returned to Sicily to die, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. While he sat in a field near Gela absorbed in thought, so the fable goes, an eagle, hovering over the spot with a tortoise in its talons, let the tortoise fall on his bald crown, which it mistook for a shining cobble-stone, for the purpose of breaking the shell. The bird’s aim was true; and the blow fractured the poet’s skull. Thus, in fulfilment of an oracular prediction, Æschylus received his death-stroke from heaven. In sublimity and power of dealing with the terrible, Æschylus is unequalled. Even the resources of the versatile Greek tongue were hardly adequate to the expression of his conceptions. He found congenial subjects only among the gods and demigods of mythology or the tragical events of the heroic period. His genius enabled him to give life and shape to the vast and the supernatural, as few others have done—and most effectively, though his plot is always simple. Sir Walter Scott thus speaks of Æschylus in his Essay on the Drama:—“At his summons, the mysterious and tremendous volume of destiny, in which are inscribed the dooms of gods and men, seemed to display its leaves of iron before the appalled spectators; the more than mortal voices of deities, Titans, and departed heroes, were heard in awful conference; Olympus bowed, and its divinities descended; earth yawned, and gave up the pale spectres of the dead; and the yet more undefined and grisly forms of those infernal deities who struck horror into the gods themselves. All this could only be dared and done by a poet of the highest order.”