Meditation in Solitude

Abstract

he Florentine Picture Chronicle in the British Museum,' contains a representation of the 'Death of Aeschylus' (P1. 44b) in which the poet is seen in an open space with a wood at the back, seated on the stony ground beside a river. He sits meditating with downcast eyes, leaning his bald head on his hand and resting his elbow on his knee, on which he holds an open book. On the top of his head is seen a tortoise, and this appears again in the sky falling from the claws of a large eagle. According to Pliny and Valerius Maximus,2 Aeschylus, of whom it had been predicted that he was to meet his death on a certain day as the result of an object falling on his head, went out into the open, trusting in the clear sky, and was killed by a tortoise, dropped on to his head by an eagle.3 The story seems to illustrate the ancient idea of fate: however much he guarded himself, Aeschylus was unable to escape his destiny. A later version of the Aeschylus legend is found in Aelianus (third century A.D.), who, having explained the eagle's method of obtaining the flesh of the tortoise,4 goes on : "Once when Aeschylus was sitting on a stone, according to his habit and custom, and was doubtless philosophizing and writing, an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a stone,5 threw down on to it a tortoise, which he had lifted high into the air, and, with unerring aim, killed him." This version shows an important difference from the earlier ones by Pliny and Valerius Maximus. The prophecy and the fear of impending fate, which had been the alleged reason for Aeschylus' retirement, have disappeared from the text, and instead another antique idea is introduced as a conjecture :-"nimirum," doubtless, he had gone out to write and philosophize. The tragic author trying to escape his fate is replaced by the poet-philosopher, who seeks solitude in the open air. The drawing in the Florentine Picture Chronicle comes so close to the description of Aelianus that we can hardly suppose it to have been invented independently.6 The influence of this source becomes more evident in contrast to the traditional type of representations of Aeschylus in the Picture Chronicles of the early Quattrocento. Our plate 44a shows the scene in