But dramatic poetry was still more varied and remarkable. Even the great masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides, were regarded by contemporaries as inferior to many tragedies utterly unknown to us. [Sidenote: Aeschylus.] The great creator of the Greek drama was Aeschylus, born at Eleusis, 525 B.C. It was not till the age of forty-one that he gained his first prize. Sixteen years afterwards, defeated by Sophocles, he quitted Athens in disgust, and went to the court of Hiero, king of Syracuse. But he was always held, even at Athens, in the highest honor, and his pieces were frequently reproduced upon the stage. It was not so much his object to amuse an audience, as to instruct and elevate it. He combined religious feeling with lofty moral sentiment. And he had unrivaled power over the realm of astonishment and terror. "At his summons," says Sir Walter Scott, "the mysterious and tremendous volume of destiny, in which is inscribed the doom 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; heaven bowed, and its divinities descended; earth yawned and gave up the pale spectres of the dead, and yet more undefined and ghastly forms of those infernal deities who struck horror into the gods themselves." His imagination dwells in the loftiest regions of the old mythology of Greece; his tone is always pure and moral, though stern and harsh. He appeals to the most violent passions, and he is full of the boldest metaphors. In sublimity he has never been surpassed. He was in poetry, what Pheidias and Michael Angelo were in art. The critics say that his sublimity of diction is sometimes carried to an extreme, so that his language becomes inflated. His characters are sublime, like his sentiments; they were gods and heroes of colossal magnitude. His religious views were Homeric, and he sought to animate his countrymen to deeds of glory, as it became one of the generals who fought at Marathon to do. He was an unconscious genius, and worked, like Homer, without a knowledge of artistical laws. He was proud and impatient, and his poetry was religious rather than moral. He wrote seventy plays, of which only seven are extant; but these are immortal, among the greatest creations of human genius, like the dramas of Shakespeare. He died in Sicily in the sixty-ninth year of his age. The principal English translation of his plays are by Potter, Harford, and Medwin. [Footnote: See Muller and Bode, histories of Greek Literature.] [Sidenote: Sophocles.]