Æschylus, the first poet who rendered the drama illustrious, and into whose character and writings the severe and ascetic doctrines of Pythagoras entered largely, was born at Eleu'sis, in Attica, in 525 B.C. He fought, as will be remembered, in the combats of Marathon and Salamis, and also in the battle of Platæa. He therefore flourished at the time when the freedom of Greece, rescued from foreign enemies, was exulting in its first strength; and his writings are characteristic of the boldness and vigor of the age. In his works we find the fundamental idea of the Greek drama--retributive justice. The sterner passions alone are appealed to, and the language is replete with bold metaphor and gigantic hyperbole. Venus and her inspirations are excluded; the charms of love are unknown: but the gods--vast, majestic, in shadowy outline, and in the awful sublimity of power-pass before and awe the beholder. [Footnote: see Grote's "History of Greece," Chap. lxvii.] Says a prominent reviewer: "The conceptions of the imagination of Æschylus are remarkable for a sort of colossal sublimity and power, resembling the poetry of the Book of Job; and those poems of his which embody a connected story may be said to resemble the stupendous avenues of the Temple of Elora, [See Index.] with the vast scenes and vistas; its strange, daring, though rude sculptures; its awful, shadowy, impending horrors. Like the architecture, the poems, too, seem hewn out of some massy region of mountain rock. Æschylus appears as an austere poet-soul, brooding among the grand, awful, and terrible myths which have floated from a primeval world, in which traditions of the Deluge, of the early, rudimental struggle between barbaric power and nascent civilization, were still vital." "The personal temperament of the man," says DR. PLUMPTRE, [Footnote: "The Tragedies of Æschylus," by E. H. Plumptre, D.D.] seems to have been in harmony with the characteristics of his genius. Vehement, passionate, irascible; writing his tragedies, as later critics judged, as if half drunk; doing (as Sophocles said of him) what was right in his art without knowing why; following the impulses that led him to strange themes and dark problems, rather than aiming at the perfection of a complete, all-sided culture; frowning with shaggy brows, like a wild bull, glaring fiercely, and bursting into a storm of wrath when annoyed by critics or rival poets; a Marlowe rather than a Shakspeare: this is the portrait sketched by one who must have painted a figure still fresh in the minds of the Athenians. [Footnote: Aristophanes, in The Frogs.] Such a man, both by birth and disposition, was likely to attach himself to the aristocratic party, and to look with scorn on the claims of the demos to a larger share of power; and there is hardly a play in which some political bias in that direction may not be traced."