With such-like dreams the kingly dark for me Was ever fraught, me miserable: till, ridden, I gat me heart to open to my father The visions and the dreams of night. And he To Pytho, yea, and even to Dodona, Sent embassage on embassage, inquiring What thing he had need to do, or what word speak, To pleasure them that rule us. And they came, Bringing still back burden of wavering lips, Sentences, blind, dark syllables. At last A word clear-visaged came to Machus Enjoining plainly and saying he should thrust me Forth of the house, forth of the land, to wander At large, a separate thing even to the last Confines of earth. The story is the same, but the treatment is different, and the two passages illustrate the difference between romantic idealism and realistic depreciation. But Io, in the _Prometheus_, is only one of the gallery of Æschylus’ heroines, for in his art women take the foremost place. The dramatist is at variance with his age, and his fervent patriotism is almost the sole bond of union between him and his fellows. Æschylus is a mystic; he believed in the Delphic inspiration, and took an interest in religious speculation. His contemporaries were materialists, suspected the politics of Delphi, and regarded religion simply as a ceremony. Æschylus was a conservative in politics, although a liberal in thought; Athens was already becoming an extreme democracy. Finally, Æschylus bases his theatre on women, and makes them the chief agents of the drama, while the ordinary woman of his time was shut out altogether from the active business of life. But he is an unconscious feminist, and the definite purpose which we find in Euripides is quite absent from his plays. It shows, however, a strange lack of appreciation to reproach him, as some critics have done, with neglecting the feminine interest. Of the seven tragedies that the Byzantine tradition has preserved for us, four, if their subject was handled by a modern dramatist, would be called feminist problem plays, and in the other three the female characters supply most of the dramatic interest, even though the first idea of the plot might seem to put them in the second plan of action.