a once fortified city of Belgium, on the river Demer, 7 miles from Louvain, and 20 from Antwerp, containing 4053 inhabitants.

ERTSEN, Peter, a Dutch historical painter of great merit, both for drawing and colouring. His master-pieces are an altar-piece at Delft, representing the Nativity and the Wise Men's Offering, and one at Amsterdam of the Death of the Virgin. He died in 1575, aged 56.

ÆRUGINOUS, an epithet given to such things as resemble or partake of the nature of the rust of copper.

ÆRUGO, a Latin term which properly signifies the rust of copper, whether natural or artificial. The former is found about copper mines, and the latter, called verdigris, is made by corroding copper plates with acids.

ÆRUSCATORES, in Antiquity, a kind of strolling beggars, not unlike gypsies, who drew money from the credulous by fortune-telling, &c. It was also a denomination given to gripping exactors, or collectors of the revenue. The Galli, or priests of Cybele, were called aruspacores magna matris; and pyppaypyra, from their begging in the streets; to which end they had little bells to draw people's attention, similar to some orders of mendicants abroad.

ÆS, commonly translated brass: but the as of the Romans was a bronze, or alloy of copper and tin; and the cutting instruments of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians were also of bronze. The Romans borrowed their arms, as well as their money, from the Etruscans. Analysis of the bronzes of these nations shew that they contain from 8 to 12 per cent. of tin, which gave them hardness and the capability of receiving a good edge.

ÆS CIRCUMFORANEUM, money borrowed from the usurers around the Roman Forum. (Cic. ad. Attic. iii.)

ÆS EQUESTRE, ÆS HORDEARIUM, ÆS MILITARE, ancient terms for the pay of Roman soldiers, previous to the introduction of the regular stipendium, and furnished, it would appear, not from the public treasury, but by certain private persons as decreed by the state. The first, which amounted to 10,000 asses, was the purchase-money of the horse of an Eques; the second, amounting to 2000 asses, was the pay of an Eques, and was furnished by maidens, widows, and orphans, if possessed of a certain amount of property, in consideration that they enjoyed protection, and were not included in the census; and it seems probable that they were also charged with the payment of the Æs Equestre: the third, which Niebuhr reckons at 1000 asses a-year (the year then containing but 10 months), was the pay of a foot-soldier, and probably was provided by the tribuni aerarii, who would appear to have been private persons who received that title as collectors of the tributum for paying the army.—See Smith's Dict. of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 2d. edition.

ÆS UXORIUM, in Antiquity, a sum paid by bachelors, as a penalty for living single to old age. This tax for not marrying seems to have been first imposed in the year of Rome 350, under the censorship of M. Furius Camillus and M. Posthumus. At the census, or review of the people, each person was asked, Et tu ex animi sententia acerem habes liberorum querendorum causa? He who had no wife was hereupon fined after a certain rate, called æs uxorium.

Per Æs et libram was a formula in the Roman law, whereby purchases and sales were ratified. Originally the phrase seems to have been only used in speaking of things sold by weight, or by the scales; but afterwards was used on other occasions. Hence even in adoptions, as there was a kind of imaginary purchase, the formula thereof expressed, that the person adopted was bought per æs et libram.

ÆSCHINES, an Athenian, a Socratic philosopher, the son of Charinus, a sausage-maker. He was continually with Socrates; which occasioned this philosopher to say, that the sausage-maker's son was the only person who knew how to pay a due regard to him. It is said that poverty obliged him to go to Sicily to Dionysius the tyrant; and that he met with great contempt from Plato, but was extremely well received by Aristippus, to whom he showed some of his dialogues, and received from him a handsome reward. He would not venture to profess philosophy at Athens, Plato and Aristippus being in such high esteem; but he opened a school, in which he taught philosophy to maintain himself. He afterwards wrote orations for the forum. Phrynicus, in Photius, ranks him amongst the best orators, and mentions his orations as the standard of the pure Attic style. Hermogenes has also spoken very highly of him. He wrote, besides, several Dialogues: 1. Concerning virtue, whether it can be taught. 2. Eryxias, or Erasistratus; concerning riches, whether they are good. 3. Axiochus; concerning death, whether it is to be feared,—but those extant on the several subjects, are not genuine remains. M. le Clerc has given a Latin translation of them, with notes and several dissertations, entitled Silvae Philologicae.

ÆSCHINES, a celebrated Grecian orator, was born in Attica 389 years before the Christian era. According to his own account, he was of distinguished birth; according to that of Demosthenes, he was the son of a courtesan, and a humble performer in a company of comedians. But whatever was the true history of his birth and early life, his talents, which were considerable, procured him great applause, and enabled him to be a formidable rival to Demosthenes himself. The two orators, inspired probably with mutual jealousy and animosity, became at last the strenuous leaders of opposing parties. Æschines was accused by Demosthenes of having received money as a bribe, when he was employed on an embassy to Philip of Macedon. He indirectly retaliated the charge by bringing an accusation against Cresiphon, the friend of Demosthenes, for having moved a decree, contrary to the laws, to confer on Demosthenes a golden crown, as a mark of public approbation. A numerous as- Æschylus, sembly of judges and citizens met to hear and decide the question. Each orator employed all his powers of eloquence; but Demosthenes, with superior talents, and with justice on his side, was victorious; and Æschines was sent into exile. The resentment of Demosthenes was now softened into generous kindness; for when Æschines was going into banishment, he requested him to accept of a sum of money; which made him exclaim, "How do I regret leaving a country where I have found an enemy so generous, that I must despair of ever meeting with a friend who shall be like him?"

Æschines opened a school of eloquence at Rhodes, which was the place of his exile; and he commenced his lectures by reading to his audience the two orations which had been the cause of his banishment. His own oration received great praise, but that of Demosthenes was heard with boundless applause. In so trying a moment, when vanity must be supposed to have been deeply wounded, with a noble generosity of sentiment, he said, "What would you have thought if you had heard him thunder out the words himself?"—Æschines afterwards removed to Samos, where he died in the 75th year of his age. Three only of his orations are extant. His eloquence is not without energy, but it is diffuse and ornamented, and more calculated to please than to move the passions.

Æschylus, the father of the Greek tragic drama, was born in the year 525 B.C., in the Attic demos of Eleusis. The period of his youth and manhood coincides, therefore, with that great uprising of the national spirit of the Greeks, caused by the successive attempts of Darius, king of Persia, and his son Xerxes, to enslave their European neighbours on the north and west shores of the Ægean; and it was no doubt as much for the advantage of his poetical faculty as for the development of his manhood, that he took an active part in those famous military achievements by which the march of the insolent Asiatic hosts was repelled. The father of Attic tragedy helped, in the year 490, to drive the captains of Darius into the marshes of Marathon, and, ten years later, encompassed with ruin the multitudinous armament of Xerxes, within the narrow strait of Salamis. The glories of this naval achievement, the bard who had helped to win it with his sword afterwards lived to celebrate with the lyre, and left to the world the play of The Persians, as a great national record of combined poetry and patriotism almost unique in history. Of his subsequent career at Athens, only a few scanty notices remain, and those chiefly connected with the representation of his plays. We know that he composed 70 plays, and that he gained the prize for dramatic excellence 13 times; further, that the Athenians esteemed his works so highly as to allow some of them to be represented after his death,—a privilege, in their dramatic practice, altogether anomalous. We know, also, that in the course of his life he paid one or two visits to Sicily, to which country he was attracted, no doubt, by the same literary influence in the person of its ruler Hiero, that drew thither Bacchylides, Simonides, and other notable men of that rich epoch. There can, at the same time, be little doubt that one cause of his visits to that island may have been a want of sympathy as to political matters between him and the Athenian public; for while the Athenians, from the time of Cleisthenes (A.D. 510), had been advancing by rapid and decided steps to the full expansion of the democratic principle, it is evident, from some passages in his plays, especially from the whole tone and tendency of the Eumenides, that the political leanings of the poet of the Prometheus were towards aristocracy, and that, in the days of Pericles, he foresaw, with a sorrowful fear, the ripeness of those democratic evils which within so short a period led Xenophon to seek a new fatherland in Sparta, and opened to the Macedonian a plain path to the sovereignty of Greece.

But whatever may have been his motives for retiring from Æschylus, the scene of so many literary triumphs (and the gossipers of ancient times have of course transmitted to us their pleasant inventions on this point), it is certain that, in the year A.D. 456, two years after the representation of his great trilogy, The Orestiad, he died at Gela, in Sicily, in the 69th year of his age; and the people of Gela, rejoicing in his bones, as Ravenna does in those of the banished Dante, inscribed the following memorial on his tomb:

"Here Æschylus lies, from his Athenian home Remote, 'neath Gela's wheat-producing loam; How brave in battle was Euphorion's son, The long-haired Mede can tell who fell at Marathon."

And thus he lives among posterity, celebrated more as a patriot than as a poet; as if to witness to all times, that the great world of books, with all its power, is but a small thing unless it be the reflection of a greater world of action.

Of the seventy plays which an old biographer reports him to have composed, only seven remain, with a few fragments of little significance, save to the keen eye of the professed philologist. These fragments, however, are sufficient to justify the high esteem in which he was held by the Athenian public, and by that greatest of all the great wits of a witty age and a witty people, Aristophanes. In the grand trilogy which exhibits, in three consecutive tragedies, the story of the murder of Agamemnon, and its moral sequences, we have a perfect specimen of what the Greek tragedy was to the Greeks, as at once a complex artistic machinery for the exhibition of national legend, and a grave pulpit for the preaching of important moral truths; nor could a more worthy founder than Æschylus of such a "Sacred Opera" be imagined. His imagination dwells habitually in the loftiest region of the stern old religious mythology of primeval Greece; his moral tone is pure—his character earnest and manly—and his strictly dramatic power (notwithstanding the very imperfect form of the drama in his day), as exhibited more especially in the Agamemnon, in the Eumenides, and in some parts of the Prometheus, is such as none of his famous successors, least of all Euripides, could surpass. Of his other plays, the Seven against Thebes is a drama, as Aristophanes expressed it, "full of war," and breathes in every line the spirit of the age and of the people that saved Europe from the grasp of Oriental despotism; The Persians, though weak in some parts, contains some fine choral poetry, and a description of the battle of Salamis, that will belong to the poetry of the world so long as the world lasts; while The Suppliants presents much in a tasteful translation, that makes us lament the loss of the missing pieces of the trilogy to which it belonged, no less than the blundering of the thoughtless copyists of the middle ages, by whose pen it has been so egregiously defaced. For in ancient times the flowing rhetorical Euripides was found a more useful model for the schools of eloquence, than the lofty, stern, and sometimes harsh, and occasionally it may be obscure, Æschylus: therefore, the text of the latter has been comparatively neglected, and much work was left for the tasteful philologist, before many parts of his noblest choruses could be rendered legible. Of the editions of Æschylus, the most notable in the earlier times of modern scholarship is that of Stanley; in more recent times, that of Schütz, who undertook the work of restoration with much learning and great boldness. The impulse given by this scholar was moderated by Wellauer, who, in his edition, along with some happy emendations, principally endeavoured to vindicate the authority of the manuscript readings from the large license of conjectural critics; and now from the remains of the great Hermann, has been published a text that should present the just medium between the timidity of Wellauer, and the rashness of mere conjectural criticism. Of English poetical translations there are only two; the old one by Potter, and a recent one by Blackie. There is also a translation in literal prose by Buckley.

(J.S.B.)

**ÆSCULAPIUS**, in the Heathen Mythology, the god of physic, was the son of Apollo and the nymph Coronis. He was educated by the centaur Chiron, who taught him physic, by which means Æsculapius cured the most desperate diseases. But Jupiter, enraged at his restoring to life Hippolytus, who had been torn in pieces by his own horses, killed him with a thunderbolt. According to Cicero, there were three deities of this name; the first, the son of Apollo, worshipped in Arcadia, who invented the probe and bandages for wounds; the second, the brother of Mercury killed by lightning; and the third, the son of Arsippus and Arsinoe, who first taught the art of tooth-drawing and purging. At Epidaurus, Æsculapius's statue was of gold and ivory, with a long beard, his head surrounded with rays, holding in one hand a knotty stick, and the other entwined with a serpent; he was seated on a throne of the same materials as his statue, and had a dog lying at his feet. The Romans crowned him with laurel, to represent his descent from Apollo; and the Philissians represented him as beardless. The cock, the raven, and the goat, were sacred to this deity. His chief temples were at Pergamus, Smyrna, Tricca, a city in Thessaly, and the isle of Coos; in all which votive tablets were hung up, showing the diseases cured by his assistance. But his most famous shrine was at Epidaurus, where, every five years, games were instituted to him, nine days after the Isthmian games at Corinth.

**ÆSOP**, the fabulist, was born about the year 620 B.C., but the place of his birth is uncertain, that honour being claimed alike by Samos, Sardis, Mesebrum in Thrace, and Cotocum in Phrygia. He was brought, while young, to Athens as a slave, and having served several masters, was eventually enfranchised by Iadmon the Samian. He thereupon visited Croesus king of Lydia, at whose court he is represented by Plutarch as reproving Solon for his discourteous manner towards the king. During the usurpation of Pisistratus, he is said to have visited Athens, and composed the fable of *Jupiter and the Frogs* for the instruction of the citizens (Phaedrus, i. 2). As the ambassador of Croesus at Delphi, he was charged with the distribution of the large sum of four mina to each of the citizens; but, in consequence of some dispute, he returned the money to Croesus. The Delphians, incensed at his conduct, accused him of sacrilege, and threw him headlong from a precipice, about 564 B.C. A pestilence which ensued being attributed to this crime, the people declared their willingness to make compensation for his death; which in default of a nearer connection was claimed and received by Iadmon, the grandson of his old master. (*Plut. de seru Nom. Vind.*, p. 556. *Herodot.* ii. 134.) None of Æsop's works are extant. The popular stories regarding him are derived from a life prefixed to a book of fables purporting to be his, collected by Maximus Planudes, a monk of the fourteenth century, in which he is represented as a monster of ugliness and deformity, a notion utterly without foundation, and doubtless intended to heighten his wit by the contrast. That this life, however, was in existence a century before Planudes's time, appears by a manuscript of it found at Florence, and published in 1809. In Plutarch's *Coræcium*, where Æsop is a guest, though there are many jests on his original servile condition, there are none on his appearance; and it would seem that the ancients were not usually restrained by delicacy in this point, since the personal defects of Socrates, and his resemblance to old Silenus, afford ample matter for merriment and raillery in the *Symposium* of Plato. We are told, besides, that the Athenians erected, in honour of Æsop, a noble statue by the famous sculptor Lysippus, a circumstance which alone were sufficient to confute the absurd fiction of his deformity; but more to the point is the statement of Pliny (xxxvi. 12.), that he was the *Contubernalis* of Rhodope, his fellow-slave, whose extraordinary beauty passed into a proverb:

"Απανθ' ὄψις, καὶ Ροδόπης ἦ καλὴ."

The obscurity in which the history of Æsop is involved, has induced some to deny his existence altogether; and Giambattista Vico, in his *Scienza Nuova*, chooses rather to consider him as an abstraction,—an excess of scepticism which is quite unreasonable. Whether Æsop left any written fables, has been more justly disputed, and Bentley inclines to the negative. Thus Aristophanes (*In Vespis*, v. 1239) represents the old man as learning his fables in conversation, and not from a book; and Socrates essayed to versify such as he remembered (*Plat. Phaed*. p. 61.). Others again are of opinion, that a collection had been made of them before the time of Socrates. (*Mus. Crit.* i. 408.) It is, however, certain that fables bearing Æsop's name were popular at Athens during the most brilliant period of its literary history; though the discrepancies of authors in quoting the same fables seem in favour of Bentley's hypothesis. (Compare Aristot. *De Part. Anim.* iii. 2.; and Lucian. *Nigr.* 32.) The original fables were in prose, and were turned into verse by several writers; the first, after the example of Socrates, being Demetrius Phalereus. Next appeared an edition in elegiac verse, often cited by Suidas, but the author's name is unknown; then Babrius, an excellent Greek poet, turned them into choliambics; but of ten books, a few fables only are preserved entire. Of the Latin writers of Æsopian fables, Phaedrus is the most celebrated.

"Æsopus auctor quam materiam repertit, Ilano ego polivi versibus semaris."

P.H.D.

The fables now extant in prose under Æsop's name are entirely spurious, as proved by Bentley in his *Dissertation on the Fables of Æsop*, and have been assigned an oriental origin. The identification of Æsop with the Arabian philosopher and fabulist Lokman (who is made by some traditions the contemporary of the psalmist David), has frequently been attempted; and the Persian accounts of Lokman, which among other things describe him as an ugly black slave, appear to have been blended by the author of the *Life* published by Planudes, with the classical stories respecting Æsop. The similarity of the fables ascribed to each renders it probable that they were derived from the same Indo-Persian source, or from the Chinese, who appear to have possessed such fables in very remote antiquity. A complete collection of the Æsopian Fables, 231 in number, was published at Breslau, by J. G. Schneider, in 1810.

**ÆSOP**, a Greek historian, whose life of Alexander the Great is preserved in a Latin translation by Julius Valerius. It is a work of no credit, abounding in errors.

**ÆSOP**, Clodius, a celebrated actor, who flourished about the 670th year of Rome. He and Roscius were contemporaries, and the best performers who ever appeared upon the Roman stage; the former excelling in tragedy, the latter in comedy. Cicero put himself under their direction, to perfect his action. Æsop lived in a most expensive manner, and at one entertainment is said to have had a dish which cost above L.800. This dish, we are told, was filled with singing and speaking birds, some of which cost near L.50. The delight which Æsop took in this sort of birds proceeded, as M. Bayle observes, from the expense. He did not make a dish of them because they could speak, (according to the refinement of Pliny upon this circumstance,) this motive being only accidental, but because of their extraordinary price. ÆSTHETICS If there had been any birds that could not speak, and yet more scarce and dear than these, he would have procured such for his table. When he was upon the stage, he entered into his part to such a degree as sometimes to be seized with a perfect ecstasy. Plutarch mentions it as reported of him, that whilst he was representing Atreus deliberating how he should revenge himself on Thyestes, he was so transported beyond himself in the heat of action, that with his truncheon he smote one of the servants crossing the stage, and laid him dead on the spot. Aëop's son was no less luxurious than his father, for he dissolved pearls for his guests to swallow. Some speak of this as a common practice of his; but others mention his falling into this excess only on a particular day, when he was treating his friends. Horace speaks only of one pearl of great value, which he dissolved in vinegar and drank.

ÆSTHETICS, a term derived from ἀσθενεῖας, "belonging to sensation," employed by the followers of the German metaphysicians to designate philosophical investigations into the theory of The Beautiful, or Philosophy of the Fine Arts, which they are disposed to regard as a distinct science. It was first used in this sense by Wolf, about the middle of last century; and Winckelmann, in his work on painting and sculpture, maintains that beauty is a special property of bodies. Similar views are maintained by Baumgarten and Schelling, who apply their general principles to poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. Æsthetical speculations do not appear to have contributed anything to the improvement of the fine arts, or to our real knowledge of mental phenomena.

ÆSTIMATIO CAPITIS, a term met with in old law-books for a fine anciently ordained to be paid for offences committed against persons of quality, according to their several degrees.

ÆSTIVAL, in a general sense, denotes something connected with, or belonging to summer. Hence æstival sign, æstival solstice, &c.

ÆSTUARY, in Geography, denotes an arm of the sea, which runs a good way within land. Such is the Bristol channel, and many of the firths of Scotland.

ÆSTUARY, in ancient baths, a secret passage from the hypocaustum into the chambers.

ÆSTUARY, among Physicians, a vapour bath, or any other instrument for conveying heat to the body.

ÆSTUI, a people that dwelt on the sea-coast in the N.E. of Germany, whose manners are minutely described by Tacitus. In appearance and manners, says that author, they resemble the Suevi; their language, that of Britain. They worshipped the mother of the gods, in whose honour they wore images of the boar, as amulets in war; fighting chiefly with clubs, as they had little iron. They engaged in husbandry, and gathered amber for the Roman market. This substance they called glessa. Their name is still preserved in the modern Esthen, the German name of the Esthoniens. See Latham's Germania of Tacitus, p. 166. Ukert, vol. iii., pt. i., p. 420.

ÆSYMNETES, Ἀσυμνητες, among the Greeks, was, like the Roman dictator, a person invested by the people with absolute power for a limited period in great emergencies of the State. Such was Pittacus at Mytilene, or Dracon and Solon at Athens.—Arist. Polit. iii. iv.

ÆSYMNIUM, in Antiquity, a monument erected to the memory of the heroes by Æsymnus the Megarean. On consulting the oracle in what manner the Megareans might be most happily governed, he was answered, By holding consultation with the more numerous. Taking this to signify the dead, he built the said monument, and a senate-house that embraced it within its compass, imagining that thus the dead would assist at their consultations.—Pausanias.