In a few years after this, he, with his brother Ameinias, performed a distinguished part at the battle of Salamis; and this victory he eight years afterwards celebrated in his play of the PERSIANS, the earliest of his extant productions, of which the date is certainly known.[f3] The next mention that we find of the poet, among the few stray and comparatively unimportant notices that remain, is that some time between the year 478, that is, two years after the battle of Salamis, and the year 467, he paid a visit to Sicily, and along with Pindar, Bacchylides, Simonides, and other famous poets, was hospitably entertained by Hieron the famous tyrant of Syracuse. The two dates mentioned are those which mark the beginning and the end of the reign of that ruler; within which period, of course, the visit to Sicily must have taken place. Plutarch, in his life of Cimon (c. 8), connects Æschylus' departure for Sicily with the first tragic victory gained by the young Sophocles in the year preceding the death of Hiero; but it is possible that this precise date may have no other foundation than the story which attributed the Sicilian journey of the elder bard to his envy of the rising greatness of the younger; an instance of that sort of impertinence in which small wits constantly indulge when they busy themselves to assign motives for the actions of great ones. But the precise period is of small moment. When in Sicily, we are told {30} that Æschylus re-exhibited his play of the Persians,[f4] and also wrote a play called the AETNEANS, to celebrate the foundation of the new city of Etna by his patron. This event, we are informed by Diodorus (xi. 49), took place in the year 476, a date which would require the presence of the poet in Sicily six years before the date mentioned by Plutarch. Connected with Sicily, there is worthy of mention also, in a life of Æschylus, the notable eruption of Etna, which took place in the year 479--the same in which the battle of Platæae took place[f5]--because there is a distinct allusion to this in the Prometheus Bound (p. 192), which enables us to say that this famous drama could not have been written before the forty-seventh year of the poet's life--that is to say, the full maturity of his powers. The next date in the life of the poet, according to the recently discovered διδασκαλία to the SEVEN AGAINST THEBES,[f6] is the representation of the great Oedipodean tetralogy in the year 467; and the next date is a yet more important one, the year of the representation of that famous trilogy, still extant, which has always been looked on as his masterpiece. The argument of the AGAMEMNON fixes the exhibition of the trilogy of which it is the first piece, to the year of the archonship of Philocles, B.C. 458. It is known, also, that the poet died at Gela, in Sicily, two years afterwards, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, the date being given in the marble; and there can be little doubt that the