The answer to the first question should be given in the form of three parallel columns containing all the single affirmations found in the different sources, references to similar details appearing on the same line in the different columns, thus facilitating comparison. These columns should be followed by (1) a column containing the common details found in all the sources, (2) a second column of details referred to by two sources, and (3) other columns containing details given by but one source. In going through this operation all the pupils will have noticed that Plutarch made use of the “Persians,” and, consequently is not independent of Æschylus. Before the questions concerning the independence and value of the sources can be answered, the sources must be localized. Æschylus probably fought in the battle of Salamis and was thus an eyewitness. Note, however, the character of this source; a play performed before the Athenian people and presented some seven years after the event. A play does not offer a good opportunity to describe a battle in detail; the dramatist would be influenced by his desire to produce a work of art and to impress his audience; he would have forgotten much in the years that had passed since the battle. Although the record of an eyewitness, we cannot look upon this play as the best kind of evidence. Herodotus was an infant, playing in the streets of Halicarnassus, when the battle of Salamis was fought. He wrote his account nearly fifty years later, basing it largely, almost wholly, upon oral tradition, although it is highly probable that he was acquainted with the “Persians” when he wrote. Nothing that Herodotus tells us here came from personal observation, nor do we know where he obtained his information, i. e., whether it was simply common report that he gathered up, or whether he talked with the most reliable witnesses of the battle. His account is less valuable than that of Æschylus as a second-hand record, but its form--a direct, detailed prose narrative--is more favorable to truth. Plutarch lived _five hundred years_ after the battle and obtained his information about it as a reader to-day would obtain information about the voyages of Columbus, namely, by reading what later writers had to say about them. He was not a critical historian--neither was Herodotus--and often based his narrative upon the poorest kind of evidence. He refers in this extract to four of the men of whose writings he has made use, and one of them is Æschylus. Unsatisfactory Evidence.