He is acting in one of his own plays—one that been lost. He gives utterance, down there in the arena, to certain words— tremendous words, as always, we must suppose: words hurled out of the heights of an angry eternity—
"Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,"
—and Athens, that used to thrill and go mad to such tones when they proclaimed the godlike in her own soul and encouraged her to grand aspirations—goes mad now in another sense. She has grown used to hear warning in them, and something in alliance with her own stifled conscience protesting against her wrong courses; and such habituation rarely means acquiescence or soothed complacency. Now she is smitten and stung to the quick. A yell from the mob; uproar; from the tiers above tiers they butt, lurch, lunge, pour forward and down: the tinkers and cobblers, demagogs and demagoged: intent—yes—to kill. But he, having yet something to say, takes refuge at the altar; and there even a maddened mob dare not molest him. But the prize goes to a rising star, young Sophocles; and presently the Gods' Messenger is formally accused and tried for "Profanation of the Mysteries."
Revealing secrets pertaining to them, in fact. And now note this: his defense is that he did not know that his lines revealed any secret—was unaware that what he had said pertained to the Mysteries. Could he have urged such a plea, had it not been known he was uninitiated? Could he have known the teachings, had he not been instructed in a school where they were known? He, then, was an initiate of the Pythagoreans, the new Theosophical Movement upon the new method; not of Orthodox Eleusis, that had grown old and comatose rather, and had ceased to count.—Well, the judges were something saner than the mob; memory turned again to what he had done at Marathon, what at Arternisium and Plataea; to his thirteen solid years of victory (national heroism on poetico-dramatic fields); and to that song of his that "saved at Salamis":
"O Sons of Greeks, go set your country free!"
—and he was acquitted: Athens had not yet fallen so low as to prepare a hemlock cup for her teacher. But meanwhile he would do much better among his old comrades in Sicily than at home; and thither he went.
He returned in 458, to find the Age of Pericles in full swing; with all made anew, or in the making; and the time definitely set on its downward course. 'Reform' was busy at abolishing institutions once held sacred; was the rage;—that funeral speech of Pericles, with its tactless vaunting of Athenian superiority to all other possible men and nations, should tell us something. When folk get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!—it is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in the Agamemnon—the first play of this last of his trilogies; and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the Eumenides—where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened Areopagus. Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he returned to Sicily to die.
Like so many another of his royal line, apparently a failure. And indeed, a failure he was, so far as his Athens was concerned. True, Athenian artistic judgment triumphed presently over the Athenian spite. Though it was the rule that no successful play should be performed more than once, they decreed that 'revivals' of Aeschylus should always be in order. And Aristophanes testifies to his lasting popularity—when he shows little Tomides with a bad grouch over seeing a play by Theognis, when he had gone to the theater "expecting Aeschylus";—and when he shows Aeschylus and Euripides winning, because his poetry had died with him, and so he had it there for a weapon—whereas Aeschylus's was still alive and on earth. Yes; Athens took him again, and permanently, into favor: took the poet, but not the Messenger and his message. For she had gone on the wrong road in spite of him: she had let the divine force, the influx of the human spirit which had come to her as her priceless cyclic opportunity, flow down from the high planes proper to it, on to the plane of imperialism and vulgar ambition; and his word had been spoken to the Greeks in vain—as all Greek history and Karma since has been proclaiming. But in sooth he was not merely for an age, but for all time; and his message, unlike Pindar's whom all Greece worshiped, and far more than Homer's or that of Sophocles—is vital today. Aeschylus, and Plato, and Socrates who speaks through Plato, and Pythagoras who speaks through all of them, are the Greeks whose voices are lifted forever for the Soul.
Even the political aspect of his message—the only one I have touched on—is vital. It proclaims a truth that underlies all history: one, I suspect, that remains for our Theosophical Movement to impress on the general world-consciousness so that wars may end: namely, that the impulse of Nationalism is a holy thing, foundationed upon the human spirit: a means designed by the Law for humanity's salvation. But like all spiritual forces, it must be kept pure and spiritual, or instead of saving, it will damn. In its inception, it is vision of the Soul: of the Racial or National Soul—which is a divine light to lure us away from the plane of personality, to obliterate our distressing and private moods; to evoke the divine actor in us, and merge us in a consciousness vastly greater than out own. But add to that saving truth this damning corolary: I am better than thou; my race than thine; we have harvests to reap at your expense, and our rights may be your wrongs:—and you have, though it appear not for awhile, fouled that stream from godhood:—you have debased your nationalism and made it hellish. Upon your ambitions and your strength, now in the time of your national flowering, you may win to your desire, if you will; because now the spirit is quickening the whole fiber of your national self; and the national will must become, under that pressure, almost irresistibly victorious. The Peoples of the earth shall kneel before your throne; you shall get your vulgar empire;—but you shall get it presently, as they say, "where the chicken got the axe": Vengeance is mine, saith the Law; I will repay. The cycle, on the plane to which you have dragged it down, will run its course; your high throne will go down with it, and yourself shall kneel to races you now sniff at for 'inferior.' You have brought it on to the material plane, and are now going upward on its upward trend there gaily—
"Ah, let no evil lust attack the host
Conquered by greed, to plunder what they ought not;
For yet they need return in safety home,
Doubling the goal to run their backward race"
[Agamemnon, Plumtre's translation]