At this period the structural skill of the Athenians had greatly improved, and as the celebrity of their drama increased, immense theatres arose on the hill-side, and were thronged by thousands, tier above tier, open to the wonders of expanding nature, embellished by the living sun. The Ægean on one hand, and vast mountains on the other, fanned by the breeze and relieved against brilliant skies, were harmonious features which nature accumulated round the scene. The gigantic proportions of the theatre, and the mighty range of the audience, were fully equaled by the performance itself, when Themistocles felt honored in appearing as choragus, and through kindred interpreters Æschylus unfolded the mysteries of the thrilling plot. Advancing intellect demanded grand ideal personifications; and, to meet the cravings of an age which even the perfect epic could no longer satisfy, philosophy passed into poetry, and what Homer had done for more material thought, Æschylus achieved for mind. All the vague mysteries and symbolical ethics of the East were measurably purged from alloy, while their substance was melted into the tortured immortality of Prometheus, and bound to that mount of all literary beauty, the Acropolis. As Æschylus expressed the race and period from which emerged Themistocles and Aristides, Sophocles was the correlative of Phidias, and the great Olympian who was the patron of them both. Indeed, from the majesty of his mien, and the symmetrical grandeur of his genius, he was called the Pericles of poetry. Supreme power lurked in his repose, and his thunders startled all the more because they broke upon the multitude from cloudless skies. Of all the great originals at Athens, the drama was the most indigenous, and under the culture of Sophocles perfected its growth. Imagination had fulmined with broader and brighter flashes on the preceding generation; but the works of his hand, though equally fresh from the fountains of nature, were more imbued with reason, and the solidity of manly strength. The age of Pericles was peculiarly the age of art; and Sophocles was but one of many who, to excel in his own department, mastered every cognate secret of wisdom or beauty, and brought all into subordination to his own absorbing design. He lived at a time when the trophies of Miltiades, the ambition of Alcibiades, the extravagance of Cimon, and the taste of Pericles, not less than the science and art, erudition and enthusiasm, philosophy and eloquence, diffused through all classes of the general populace, rendered the Athenians at once the most competent to appreciate, and the most difficult to please. Recondite disquisition was a pastime, the Agora itself but a genial academe; so elevated and yet so delicate were the soul and sensibilities of the excited mass, that the wisest of their sages was justified in asserting that the common people were the most accurate judges of whatever was graceful, harmonious, or sublime.