Aeschylus

• 1. Introduction

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  Aeschylus, born around 525 BC in a small town called Eleusis, about 27 kilometres northwest of Athens, left behind only seven complete plays out of an estimated 70 to 90 he wrote during his lifetime. Seven. That gap between what he created and what we can read today is itself a kind of tragedy. Yet those seven plays still changed how human beings tell stories on a stage, and the questions they raise have never fully gone away. How did one playwright transform an art form from its earliest experiments into something that could carry the weight of war, justice, and divine punishment? What did it mean to write about a real military defeat while the survivors were still alive to hear it? And what can the strange story of his death, and the even stranger story of what was inscribed on his gravestone, tell us about the world he lived in?

• 2. Soldier and Playwright

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  At the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, Aeschylus and his brother Cynegeirus stood in the line against the invading forces of Darius I of Persia. Cynegeirus died there, killed while trying to prevent a Persian ship from retreating from the shore. His countrymen celebrated him as a hero. Ten years later, in 480 BC, Aeschylus was called back into service at the Battle of Salamis, this time alongside his younger brother Ameinias. He also fought at Plataea the following year, in 479 BC.

  The significance of these wars to Aeschylus was not abstract. Ion of Chios, a witness, attested to his contribution at Salamis. When Aeschylus staged The Persians in 472 BC, a play that opens in the Persian capital of Susa with news of the catastrophe at Salamis, audiences were not watching fiction. They were watching a man who had been there.

  That personal history explains something remarkable about Aeschylus's gravestone. The inscription on it makes no mention of his theatrical achievements. It commemorates only his military service. In a society that gave him thirteen first-prize victories at the City Dionysia, that silence about the stage is striking. Aeschylus, or those who knew him best, considered the soldier and the citizen to be the truer measure of the man.

  The trial that threatened his life reinforced how seriously he took his standing in the community. He was accused of impiety after allegedly revealing secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries on stage. According to one account, an angry crowd tried to attack him. Another account says the audience tried to stone him in the theatre itself. He took refuge at the altar in the orchestra of the Theater of Dionysus and later pleaded ignorance at his trial. The jury acquitted him, in part because his brother Ameinias reportedly showed his own war wound from Salamis to remind the court of the family's sacrifice. The award for bravery at Salamis had, in fact, gone not to that Ameinias but to a different person, Ameinias of Pallene, though the confusion apparently worked in Aeschylus's favour.

• 3. The Theatre He Built

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  Before Aeschylus, the Athenian stage had a single actor who could speak with the chorus. According to Aristotle, Aeschylus added a second actor, which made genuine conflict between characters possible for the first time. The chorus, which had previously driven the drama, became a supporting presence rather than the primary voice.

  He is also credited with making costumes more elaborate and theatrical. He introduced platform boots called cothurni to make his actors more visible to an audience seated at a distance. Whether or not he invented scene-decoration, a distinction Aristotle gives to Sophocles, the physical experience of watching an Aeschylean production was designed to overwhelm. A later account of the Eumenides, the third play of the Oresteia, describes the chorus of Furies entering so terrifyingly that children fainted, older men lost control of their bodies, and pregnant women went into labour.

  His plays do not stage violence directly. Whatever brutality occurs happens offstage. His stories have a distance from daily Athenian life, either by being set far away, like The Persians, or by drawing on myths about gods and ancient houses. That distance is not evasion. The Oresteia trilogy places the human family of Agamemnon within a cosmic argument about divine law and punishment that reaches far beyond any household drama.

  The comic playwright Aristophanes, writing in The Frogs about fifty years after Aeschylus's death, gave him a role as a character in the play. Aristophanes has Aeschylus claim, at line 1022, that his Seven Against Thebes made everyone watching it love being warlike, and that with The Persians, at lines 1026-7, he taught the Athenians to desire always to defeat their enemies. The joke, if there is one, requires the audience to take both the claim and the playwright seriously.

• 4. The Oresteia and Its Legacy

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  The Oresteia of 458 BC is the only complete trilogy of plays by any ancient Greek playwright that survives. Three tragedies, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, trace a single family's catastrophe across generations. The satyr play Proteus, which followed the trilogy, survives only in fragments.

  Agamemnon opens with the king's return from Troy. His wife Clytemnestra kills him, partly in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia, and partly because he has brought home the Trojan prophetess Cassandra as his concubine. Cassandra foresees the murder and her own, tells the assembled townspeople what is coming, and walks into the palace anyway.

  The Libation Bearers brings Orestes back from exile in Phocis. He and his sister Electra plan revenge at Agamemnon's tomb. Clytemnestra has sent Electra there with libation bearers after a nightmare in which she gives birth to a snake. Orestes enters the palace pretending to carry news of his own death, then kills both Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. The Furies, who in Greek mythology avenge the murder of kin, immediately pursue him.

  The Eumenides asks what justice looks like when blood calls for blood. Athena declares that a trial is necessary. Apollo argues Orestes's case. The judges, including Athena, deliver a tie vote, and Athena breaks the tie in Orestes's favour. She renames the Furies the Eumenides, meaning the Kindly Ones, and the trilogy closes on an argument for reason as the foundation of law.

  The American playwright Eugene O'Neill, before writing his own trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931, set in America after the Civil War and modeled on the Oresteia, had been developing a play about Aeschylus himself. O'Neill wrote that Aeschylus had changed the tragic stage so thoroughly that he had more claim than anyone else to be regarded as the founder of tragedy.

  The reach of the Oresteia extended into the 20th century in a way Aeschylus could not have anticipated. During his 1968 presidential campaign, Senator Robert F. Kennedy quoted Aeschylus the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Kennedy had been warned not to attend a campaign stop in Indianapolis because of fears of violence. He went anyway and delivered an impromptu speech. He told the audience his favourite poet was Aeschylus, then quoted from Agamemnon in Edith Hamilton's translation: even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. After Kennedy was himself assassinated, that same quotation was inscribed on the memorial at his gravesite.

• 5. The Lost Plays

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  Seventy-one additional titles are ascribed to Aeschylus beyond the seven that survive, and fragments of some have appeared on Egyptian papyri, with new ones still being identified. The scale of what is gone is difficult to hold in mind. Three plays about Achilles, Myrmidons, Nereids, and Phrygians, drew from books 9, 16, 18, 19, and 22 of the Iliad. In Myrmidons, Achilles sits in silent indignation for most of the play. In Phrygians, later titled Hector's Ransom, King Priam arrives to ransom his son's body. A scale is brought onstage and Hector's body is placed in one pan and gold in the other. The dancing of the Trojan chorus when they enter with Priam was noted by Aristophanes himself.

  Another lost play, Niobe, features the heroine sitting in silent mourning on stage. In Plato's Republic, a line from the play is quoted directly: God plants a fault in mortals when he wills to destroy a house utterly.

  The trilogies that scholars have reconstructed from these fragments reveal how consistently Aeschylus worked across a sustained dramatic arc. Seven Against Thebes was the third play in an Oedipus trilogy. The Suppliants was the first in a Danaid trilogy, confirmed only when Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2256 fr. 3 was published in 1952. That papyrus settled a debate that had run for centuries.

  Authorship of Prometheus Bound, one of the seven surviving plays, remains contested. Some scholars, working from stylistic evidence, argue it was written by his son Euphorion. The debate has been active since the late 19th century, with proposed dates for the play ranging from the 480s BC to as late as the 410s, a span of more than seventy years. Aeschylus's son Euphorion won first prize at the Dionysia in 431 BC, competing against both Sophocles and Euripides.

• 6. Death and Remembrance

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  In 458 BC, Aeschylus returned to Sicily, where Hiero I of Syracuse had invited him to visit on earlier trips in the 470s. This final journey took him to Gela, where he died in 456 or 455 BC. Valerius Maximus wrote that an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head, mistaking his bald skull for a rock suitable for breaking the shell. Pliny added that Aeschylus had been staying outdoors because of a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object. Scholars have proposed that the story may have been invented from the iconography on his tomb, or inspired by a fragment of his own lost play Psychagogoi, in which Tiresias predicts a similar death for Odysseus.

  After his death, the Athenians made a decision without precedent in their theatrical culture. His tragedies were the only ones granted permission to be restaged in competition. Every other playwright's work, once performed, stayed in the past. Aeschylus alone was brought back.

  The Alexandrian Life of Aeschylus records thirteen first-prize victories at the City Dionysia. Sophocles, with a catalogue of roughly 120 plays, is said to have won eighteen. Euripides, who wrote approximately 90 plays, won five. By 473 BC, after the death of Phrynichus, Aeschylus had become the consistent favourite at the Dionysia, winning first prize in nearly every competition he entered.

  His gravestone said nothing about any of that. It named only the battles: Marathon, Salamis, the long war with Persia. The playwright who staged the Furies so terrifyingly that pregnant women went into labour had chosen, or had others choose for him, to be remembered as a soldier. Richard Wagner later studied Aeschylus closely enough that scholar Michael Ewans argued in 1982 for a direct character-by-character comparison between Wagner's Ring cycle and the Oresteia, a comparison not without its critics but not easily dismissed either.