cause of this, his final retirement to that island, must have been a growing distance between him and the Athenian public, arising from diversity of political feeling, and the state of parties in the Attic capital. In that city, democracy had been in steady advance from the time of Cleisthenes (B.C. 509), and was now ebullient under the popular inspiration of the recent Persian wars, and glorified by the captainship of Pericles. The tendencies of the poet of the Eumenides (as explained in the introduction to that play) were all aristocratic; and it is in the highest degree probable that the reception given by democratic spectators to his eulogy of the aristocratic Court of the Areopagus, in the play just mentioned, may have been such as to induce him to consult his own comfort, if not his safety, by withdrawing altogether from a scene where his continual presence might only tend to irritate those whom it could not alter. After his death the Athenians testified their esteem for his character by decreeing--what was quite an extraordinary privilege {31} according to their stage practice--that his dramas might be exhibited at the great Dionysiac festivals, when their author could be no longer a competitor for the prize.[f7] The people of Gela, justly proud that the bones of so great a man should repose in their soil, erected a monument to his memory with the following inscription:-- "Here Æschylus lies, from his Athenian home Remote, 'neath Gela's wheat-producing loam. How brave in battle was Euphorion's son The long-haired Mede can tell that fled from Marathon."