view of man's destiny, expressed in vivid images---the ``death
that lurks behind the wall'' (Ag. 1004), the ``hidden reef
which wrecks the bark, unable to weather the headland'' (Eum.
561-565). In one remarkable passage of the Eumenides
(517-525) this fear is extolled as a moral power which ought
to be enthroned in men's hearts, to deter them from impious or
violent acts, or from the pride that impels them, to such sins.
Of the poetic qualities of Aeschylus' drama and diction,
both in the lyrics and the dialogue, no adequate account
can be attempted; the briefest word must here suffice.
He is everywhere distinguished by grandeur and power of
conception, presentation and expression, and most of all in
the latest works, the Prometheus and the Trilogy. He
is pre-eminent in depicting the slow approach of fear, as in
the Persae; the imminent horror of impending fate, as in
the broken cries and visions of Cassandra in the Agamemnon
(1072-1177), the long lament and prayers to the nether powers
in the Choephoroe (313-478), and the gradual rousing of the
slumbering Furies in the Eumenides (117-139). The fatal
end in these tragedies is foreseen; but the effect is due to
its measured advance, to the slowly darkening suspense which
no poet has more powerfully rendered. Again, he is a master
of contrasts, especially of the Beautiful with the Tragic:
as when the floating vision of consoling nymphs appears to
the tortured Prometheus (115-135); or the unmatched lyrics
which tell (in the Agamemnon, 228-247) of the death of
Iphigenia; or the vision of his lost love that the night
brings to Menelaus (410-426). And not least noticeable is
the extraordinary range, force and imaginativeness of his
diction. One example of his lyrics may be given which will
illustrate more than one of these points. It is taken from
the long lament in the Septem, sung by the chorus and the two
sisters, while following the funeral procession of the two
princes. These laments may at times be wearisome to the modern
reader, who does not see, and imperfectly imagines, the stately
and pathetic spectacle; but to the ancient feeling they were as
solemn and impressive as they were ceremonially indispensable.
The solemnity is here heightened by the following lines sung
by one of the chorus of Theban women (Sept. 854-860):--
Nay, with the wafting gale of your sighs, my sisters,
Beat on your heads with your hands the stroke as of oars,
The stroke that passes ever across Acheron,
Speeding on its way the black-robed sacred bark,--
The bark Apollo comes not near,
The bark that is hidden from the sunlight--
To the shore of darkness that welcomes all!
AUTHORITIES.---The chief authority for the text is a single
MS. at Florence, of the early 11th century, known as the
Medicean or M., written by a professional scribe and revised
by a contemporary scholar, who corrected the copyist's
mistakes, added the scholia, the arguments and the dramatis
personae of three plays (Theb., Agam, Eum.), and at
the end the Life of Aeschylus and the Catalogue of his
dramas. The MS. has also been further corrected by later
hands. In 1896 the Italian Ministry of Public Instruction
published the MS. in photographic facsimile, with an instructive
preface by Signor Rostagno. Besides M. there are some eight
later MSS. (13th to 15th century), and numerous copies of the
three select plays (Sept., Pers., Prom.) which were most
read in the later Byzantine period, when Greek literature
was reduced to gradually diminishing excerpts. These later
MSS. are of little value or authority. The editions, from
the beginning of the 15th century to the present are very
numerous, and the text has been further continuously improved
by isolated suggestions from a host of scholars. The three
first printed copies (Aldine, 1518; Turnebus and Robortello,
1552) give only those parts of Agamemnon found in M., from
which MS. some leaves were lost; in 1557 the full text was
restored by Vettori (Victorius) from later MSS. After these
four, the chief editions of He seven plays were those of
Schutz, Porson, Burler, Wellauer, Dindorf, Bothe, Ahrens,
Paley, Hermann, Hartung, Weil, Merkel, Kirchhoff and
Wecklein. Besides these, over a hundred scholars have
thrown light on the corruptions or obscurities of the text,
by editions of separate plays, by emendations, by special
studies of the poet's work, or in other ways. Among recent
writers who have made such contributions may be mentioned
Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Enger, Conington, Blaydes, Cobet,
Meineke, Madvig, Ellis, W. Headlam, Davies, Tucker, Verrall and
Haigh. The Fragments have been edited by Nauck and also by
Wecklein. The Aeschylean staging is discussed in Albert
Muller's Lehrbuch der griechischen Buhnenalterhumer; in
``Die Buhne des Aeschylos,'' by Wilamowitz (Hermes, xxi.);
in Smith's Dict. of Antiquities, art. ``Theatrum'' (R. C.
Jebb); in Dorpfeld and Reisch (Das griechische Theater),
Haigh's Attic Theatre, and Gardner and Jevons' Manual of Greek
Antiquities. English Verse Translations: Agamemnon, Milman
and R. Browning; Oresteia, Suppliants, Persae, Seven against
Thebes, Prometheus Vinctus, by E. D. A. Morshead; Prometheus,
E. B. Browning; the whole seven plays, Lewis Campbell. (A. SI.)
1 The Eumenides is quoted as a parallel, because there the
establishment of this worship at Athens concludes the whole
trilogy; but it is forgotten that in Eumenides there is much
besides--the pursuit of Orestes, the refuge at Athens, the trial,
the acquittal, the conciliation by Athena of the Furies; while
here the story would be finished before the last play began.
AESCULAPIUS (Gr. `Asklepios), the legendary Greek god of
medicine, the son of Apollo and the nymph Coronis. Tricca in
Thessaly and Epidaurus in Argolis disputed the honour of his
birthplace, but an oracle declared in favour of Epidaurus.
He was educated by the centaur Cheiron, who taught him the
art of healing and hunting. His skill in curing disease and
restoring the dead to life aroused the anger of Zeus, who,
being afraid that he might render all men immortal, slew him
with a thunderbolt (Apollodorus iii. 10; Pindar, Phthia, 3;
Diod. Sic. iv. 71). Homer mentions him as a skilful physician,
whose sons, Machaon and Podalirius, are the physicians in the
Greek camp before Troy (Iliad, ii. 731). Temples were erected
to Aesculapius in many parts of Greece, near healing springs
or on high mountains. The practice of sleeping (incubatio)
in these sanctuaries was very common, it being supposed that
the god effected cures or prescribed remedies to the sick in
dreams. All who were healed offered sacrifice---especially a
cock---and hung up votive tablets, on which were recorded their
names, their diseases and the manner in which they had been
cured. Many of these votive tablets have been discovered
in the course of excavations at Epidaurus. Here was the
god's most famous shrine, and games were celebrated in his
honour every five years, accompanied by solemn processions.
Herodas (Mimes, 4) gives a description of one of his
temples, and of the offerings made to him. His worship was
introduced into Rome by order of the Sibylline books (293
B.C.), to avert a pestilence. The god was fetched from
Epidaurus in the form of a snake and a temple assigned him
on the island in the Tiber (Livy x. 47; Ovid, Metam. xv.
622). Aesculapius was a favourite subject of ancient
artists. He is commonly represented standing, dressed in a long
cloak, with bare breast; his usual attribute is a club-like
staff with a serpent (the symbol of renovation) coiled round
it. He is often accompanied by Telesphorus, the boy
genius of healing, and his daughter Hygieia, the goddess of
health. Votive reliefs representing such groups have been
found near the temple of Aesculapius at Athens. The British
Museum possesses a beautiful head of Aesculapius (or possibly
Zeus) from Melos, and the Louvre a magnificent statue.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--L. Dyer, The Gods in Greece (1891); Jane E.
Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903);
R. Caton, Examples and Ritual of A. at Epidaurus and Athens
(1900); articles in Pauly-Wissowa's Real-Encyclopadie,
Roscher's Lexikon der Mythologie; T. Panofka, Asklepios und
die Asklepiaden (1846); Alice Welton, ``The Cult of Asklepios,''
in Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, iii. (New York,
1894); W. H. D. Rouse, Greek Votive Offerings (1902).
AESERNIA (mod. Isernia), a Samnite town on the road from
Beneventum to Corfinium, 58 m. to the north-east of the former,
at the junction of a road going past Venafrum to the Via
Latina. These routes are all followed by modern railways---the
lines to Campobasso, Sulmona and Caianello. A Roman colony was
established there in 263 B.C. It became the headquarters of
the Italian revolt after the loss of Corfinium, and was only
recovered by Sulla at the end of the war, in 80 B.C. Remains
of its fortifications are still preserved---massive cyclopean
walls, which serve as foundation to the walls of the modern
town and of a Roman bridge, and the subterranean channel of
an aqueduct, cut in the rock, and dating from Roman times.
AESOP (Gr. Aisopos), famous for his Fables, is supposed
to have lived from about 620 to 560 B.C. The place of
his birth is uncertain---Thrace, Phrygia, Aethiopia, Samos,
Athens and Sardis all claiming the honour. We possess little
trustworthy information concerning his life, except that he
was the slave of Iadmon of Samos and met with a violent death
at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi. A pestilence that
ensued being attributed to this crime, the Delphians declared
their willingness to make compensation, which, in default of
a nearer connexion, was claimed and received by Iadmon, the
grandson of his old master. Herodotus, who is our authority
for this (ii. 134), does not state the cause of his death;
various reasons are assigned by later writers--his insulting
sarcasms, the embezzlement of money entrusted to him by
Croesus for distribution at Delphi, the theft of a silver cup.
Aesop must have received his freedom from Iadmon, or he could
not have conducted the public defence of a certain Samian
demagogue (Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii. 20). According to the
story, he subsequently lived at the court of Croesus, where
he met Solon, and dined in the company of the Seven Sages
of Greece with Periander at Corinth. During the reign of
Peisistratus he is said to have visited Athens, on which
occasion he related the fable of The Frogs asking for a
King, to dissuade the citizens from attempting to exchange
Peisistratus for another ruler. The popular stories current
regarding him are derived from a life, or rather romance,
prefixed to a book of fables, purporting to be his, collected
by Maximus Planudes, a monk of the 14th century. In this he
is described as a monster of ugliness and deformity, as he is
also represented in a well-known marble figure in the Villa
Albani at Rome. That this life, however, was in existence a
century before Planudes, appears from a 13th-century MS. of
it found at Florence. In Plutarch's Symposium of the Seven
Sages, at which Aesop is a guest, there are many jests on
his original servile condition, but nothing derogatory is
said about his personal appearance. We are further told
that the Athenians erected in his honour a noble statue
by the famous sculptor Lysippus, which furnishes a strong
argument against the fiction of his deformity. Lastly,
the obscurity in which the history of Aesop is involved
has induced some scholars to deny his existence altogether.
