have felt as if I could hardly endure the life which I am leading (this, Socrates, you will admit); and I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him and fly as from the voice of the siren my fate would be like that of others--he would transfix me, and I should grow old sitting at his feet. For he makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians; therefore I hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the only person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to be in my nature, and there is no one else who does the same. For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of popularity gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and fly from him, and when I see him I am ashamed of what I have confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were dead, and yet I know that I should be more sorry than glad, if he were to die; so that I am at my wit's end.

Symonds tells us that Æschylus was the great example of unconscious art among Greek playwrights, and that he exemplifies Plato's theory of poetry. Æschylus's creation Cassandra is a good illustration of a character in an ecstatic state. Cassandra is both prophetess and poetess, and her cries move us to this day, when much of Æschylus's moral and religious philosophy bores and irritates us. She is the incarnation of woman suffering. She was ravished at Troy by Ajax and was given to Agamemnon as prisoner of war, she the princess, daughter of Priam and Hecuba. She had lost most of the members of her family and now anticipated great trouble for Agamemnon whose wife Claetemnestrae was unfaithful to him. She also foresaw her own death at the queen's hands, but it was her punishment that her prophecies would not be heeded. She is partly mad, but hers is the poetic frenzy, tempered by logic. Her most meaningless ravings are full of meaning. They are poetry not because of the metre in which they are rendered, but because of the rational ecstasy. This ecstasy remains intact even in the English prose translation.

Nietzsche divided art into Apollonian and Dionysian. He found that the Dionysian state depended on emotional or orgiastic intoxication. He perceived that the ecstasy in this state was largely of a sexual character. As he boldly put it, "The desire for art and beauty is an indirect longing for the ecstasy of sexual desire, which gets communicated to the brain." This is the thesis that Freud developed. Croce, who has, however, something of the metaphysician and mystic in him, is not in sympathy with this view, for he 

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