Nor was Homer, perhaps, his sole though his guiding inspiration.

The noble birth of Aeschylus no doubt gave him those advantages of general acquaintance with the poetry of the rest of Greece, which an education formed under the lettered dynasty of the Pisistratidae would naturally confer on the well-born.

We have seen that the dithyramb, debased in Attica to the Thespian chorus, was in the Dorian states already devoted to sublime themes, and enriched by elaborate art; and Simonides, whose elegies, peculiar for their sweetness, might have inspired the "ambrosial" Phrynichus, perhaps gave to the stern soul of Aeschylus, as to his own pupil Pindar, the model of a loftier music, in his dithyrambic odes.
V.

At the age of twenty-five, the son of Euphorion produced his first tragedy.

This appears to have been exhibited in the year after the appearance of Aristagoras at Athens,--in that very year so eventful and important, when the Athenians lighted the flames of the Persian war amid the blazing capital of Sardis.