And so, with reiterated lamentations, the spectacle concludes.
With the Athenians, whose glory it exhibited so prominently, this play was naturally a favourite; but it appealed also to a far wider audience. The Persian War had been the means of bringing all Greeks together in union against the common foe; and accordingly, a play like this could not but be welcomed as an expression of the new national enthusiasm. This explains the fact that it was among those chosen by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, while Æschylus was his guest, to be repeated before the Greeks of Sicily; and this also justifies the poet in leaving for once the old national heroes, Hercules and Agamemnon, to celebrate the event which, for the first time since the Trojan war, was for all Greece a common triumph.
