The tragic genius of Æschylus was imbued with religious sentiment, and found its fittest material in the simple and sublime traditions of his forefathers. He has handed down to our days clear memorials of the still popular faith, in his noble drama of Prometheus Bound; wherein he represents Jupiter as sending to beg from the tortured prophet a revelation of the yet future decrees of destiny. This mythical benefactor, the most significant of ancient religious fables, was a Japhetite, who brought his celestial fire from the remote East to man. Prometheus indignantly refuses to gratify the curiosity of his oppressor, and utters severe invectives against the _new_ power of Jove. He alludes to wars in which he had himself assisted him, leads us back to the first colonization of Greece, and leaves us justly to conclude that the nature-worship of Orpheus had been mixed up with hero-worship also, and that the Jupiter of the poets was little better than a Cretan pirate, who, with his associates, drove out the Asian chief already beginning to civilize the people, and banished him to the wild regions of the Caucasus. The several centuries which transpired between Prometheus and Hesiod was a period long enough in legendary times to invest heroes, or benefactors of the human race, with supernatural attributes. Æschylus set forth a yet sublimer article of Athenian belief, when he represented the two Powers, immovable destiny and human consciousness, weighing the motives of the son of Agamemnon, and, under the presiding auspices of the goddess of Wisdom, leaving the ultimate decision to the Areopagus. God-conscious reason was thus called upon to sit in judgment upon the past, and to proclaim the eternal ways of infinite justice to coming generations. Herodotus, also, in the clear light of Hellenic freedom, recapitulated lapsed centuries, and foretold future destinies, through the prophetic mirror of Nemesis, that clearest reflection of Greek religiousness; and, like his predecessor, pictured the divine drama of eternal law and retribution. Thucydides followed, and became the final prophet of the great struggle of his nation, and her influence in the developments of future time. Sophocles, of all the dramatists, was the most religious; his whole life was said to be one continual worship, and his writings are redolent of his tender spirit. The Œdipus Colonæus was a marked consecration after death; the gods conferred that honor, to show that in the terrible example they made of him, it was not personal vengeance, but a salutary admonition designed for the whole human race. That the self-condemned criminal should at last find peace in the grove of the Furies, the very spot from which guilt would instinctively shrink with acutest horror, bears a moral of profound and tranquilizing significancy.