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when the vast audience thrilled with triumph and shouted for rapture as Aeschylus' Persians renewed for them the great day of Salamis. He was twelve when the victorious generals of Athens, appointed judges of a contest between giants, awarded to Sophocles the victory over Aeschylus.

A mistaken vocationAll these influences were silently moulding his genius, and fostering powers as yet uncomprehended by himself, certainly unsuspected by his parents, save, perhaps, that they may have come to regard him as not an ordinary lad who would follow unquestioningly his father's vocation. Some tokens of a restless ambition may have moved them to consult oracle or soothsayer touching their son's future. This was the answer they received:—

"A son shalt thou have, O son of Mnesarchus, whom all shall acclaim
With honour, a son who shall win the renown of a glorious name,
Who shall bind on his brows the grace of the wreaths of hallowed fame."

Hallowed wreaths suggested inevitably to a Greek the wreath of wild-olive won at the festival of Zeus in the Olympic Games. The parents could imagine no prouder ambition, especially if effort were sweetened by such a divine assurance of success; and the youth was promptly placed in the hands of the trainers. Of course nothing came of it, except a local victory or two: he was indeed entered for the Olympic Games, but was disqualified on some technical grounds by the board of managers at their preliminary scrutiny. But those two or three years of probation remained for him no pleasant memory. His experience of the life of athletes, of their absorption in the body, of their brutality, empty-headedness, and vanity, filled him with a lasting