Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Persians is an ancient Greek tragedy set in the Persian capital of Susa, following Queen Mother Atossa, her court, and the ghost of King Darius as they receive news of the catastrophic Persian defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480-479 BC. The play ends with King Xerxes returning in torn robes, lamenting the destruction of his fleet and army.
The Persians was first performed in 472 BC at Athens' City Dionysia festival, where it won first prize. Pericles served as the choregos, the citizen who financed the production.
The Persians is the oldest surviving piece of ancient Greek drama and Aeschylus' oldest surviving play. It is also notable for containing what scholars consider probably the first dream sequence in European theatre, narrated by Queen Mother Atossa early in the play.
Aeschylus fought the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC and may have also fought at Salamis, the very battle at the center of The Persians, just eight years before the play was performed.
Peter Sellars staged The Persians at the Edinburgh and Los Angeles Festivals in 1993 as a response to the Gulf War of 1990-1991, with music by Hamza El Din. Ellen McLaughlin translated it in 2003 for Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre in New York as a response to George Bush's invasion of Iraq, starring Len Cariou and Michael Stuhlbarg.
Percy Bysshe Shelley modeled his 1821 lyrical drama Hellas directly on The Persians; it was his final published poetical work before his death in 1822. T. S. Eliot echoed line 432 of the Messenger's account in The Waste Land, and Dimitris Lyacos quoted directly from the Messenger's speech in his dystopian epic Z213: Exit.