The Persians

• 1. Introduction

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  The Persians, written by Aeschylus, holds a distinction that no other surviving text can claim: it is the oldest piece of ancient Greek drama still in existence. It premiered in 472 BC at Athens' City Dionysia festival, won first prize, and it did so while the war it depicted was barely a decade old. The men sitting in the audience had fought in that war. Some may have watched their brothers or fathers die at Salamis. And yet the play they were watching did not celebrate Greek heroes. It placed them inside the Persian court, watching a queen grieve and a king return in tatters.

  What draws a playwright to the perspective of a defeated enemy? Why does a play about Greek triumph spend nearly all of its time inside Persian sorrow? And how did a drama staged once in ancient Athens come to be performed in Wales on an active military range, streamed live from Epidaurus on the anniversary of the very battle it depicts, and translated into Irish for the first time in a Dublin theatre in 2024? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Playwright and His War

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  Aeschylus fought the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC. He may have also stood on the ships at Salamis, just eight years before The Persians was performed. That personal history matters enormously to how the play reads. He was not imagining the war from a distance. He had been inside it.

  The Persians was the second play in a trilogy, and it is the only one that survived. The first play, Phineus, dealt with Jason and the Argonauts rescuing a king from the torment of monstrous harpies. The third, Glaucus, concerned either a Corinthian king devoured by his own horses for angering Aphrodite, or a Boeotian farmer who ate a magical herb and became a sea deity with the gift of prophecy. Scholars believe Aeschylus connected all three through the theme of divine retribution: pride incites punishment, and the gods deliver it.

  The satyr play that followed the trilogy was Prometheus Pyrkaeus, a comic piece about the titan's theft of fire. Plutarch preserved one of its fragments, in which Prometheus warns a satyr who wants to embrace the flame that he will mourn for his beard. Another fragment, translated by Herbert Weir Smyth, reads: "And do thou guard thee well lest a blast strike thy face; for it is sharp, and deadly-scorching its hot breaths." Even in comedy, fire burns.

• 3. Inside the Persian Court

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  Susa, one of the capitals of the Persian Empire, is where The Persians begins. The stage opens on a chorus of old men, Persian elders left behind while the great army sailed and marched westward. They are soon joined by Atossa, the Queen Mother, who narrates what scholars have called probably the first dream sequence in European theatre. Her anxiety is not abstract; she has dreamed of catastrophe before news of it arrives.

  Aeschylus structured this opening unusually for himself. In his other plays, the chorus typically enters after a speech by a minor character. Here the chorus comes first, giving the play an immediate, communal weight of dread before any single voice takes over.

  An exhausted messenger arrives with a graphic account of the Battle of Salamis. He names the Persian generals who have been killed, describes the carnage, and reports that Xerxes escaped and is returning. The climax of his speech is the battle cry of the Greeks as they charged: "On, sons of Greece! Set free your fatherland, set free your children, wives, places of your ancestral gods and tombs of your ancestors! Forward for all."

  At the tomb of her dead husband Darius, Atossa asks the chorus to summon his ghost. On learning of the defeat, Darius condemns his son's hubris and specifically rebukes Xerxes' decision to build a bridge over the Hellespont to move the Persian army across. Before departing, the ghost prophesies another Persian defeat at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC, in verses that name the Asopus river and the plains of Boeotia as the site of what he calls "the mother of disasters."

  Xerxes arrives last, in torn robes. The Queen, just before he enters, says grief swarms, "but worst of all it stings to hear how my son, my prince, wears tatters, rags." The final section of the play, from line 908 to line 1076, is a lyrical kommós: a ritual lament shared between the king and the chorus, mourning the scale of what Persia lost.

• 4. Before Aeschylus

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  Aeschylus was not the first playwright to dramatize the Persian wars. His older contemporary Phrynichus wrote two plays on the subject, and the story of what happened to him shaped the environment in which The Persians was created.

  Phrynichus' first play, The Sack of Miletus, was written in 493 BC, twenty-one years before The Persians premiered. It dealt with the Persian destruction of an Ionian colony of Athens in Asia Minor. The play was honest about Athens' failure to protect its own colony, and Athenian audiences found that honesty intolerable. Phrynichus was fined, and a law was passed forbidding any future performance of the play. The Greeks of Athens, it turned out, could be wounded by theatre.

  Phrynichus' second play, Phoenician Women, written in 476 BC, treated the same historical event that Aeschylus would later dramatize. It appeared just four years before The Persians. Neither of Phrynichus' plays survived. Aeschylus, working in the long shadow of these precedents, made a choice that Phrynichus had not managed to sustain: he kept audiences engaged with Persian grief without triggering the kind of political backlash that destroyed his predecessor's work. The prize at the City Dionysia in 472 BC confirmed that he succeeded.

• 5. Sympathy or Celebration?

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  At the core of scholarly debate about The Persians is a question that Aeschylus seems to have deliberately left open: is this play grieving with Persia, or rejoicing over its destruction?

  The sympathetic reading has the weight of Aristotelian criticism behind it. Every other surviving Greek tragedy gives its audience someone to feel for on stage. Atossa's grief, Darius's dignity, and even Xerxes' humiliation invite identification rather than contempt. Xerxes himself, in line 1034, calls his own pains "a joy to my enemies," an admission of total defeat that does not read as a villain's confession but as a human being at the bottom of his world.

  The celebratory reading argues that the play was written inside a xenophobic culture at war, and that Athenian audiences would have found it difficult or impossible to truly mourn a hated enemy. On this view, the Persian lament is spectacle rather than sympathy; the Greeks cheer while appearing to commiserate.

  Both readings can coexist in the text, and the play's long history of being revived during actual wars suggests that audiences across centuries have found whichever meaning they needed. The Athenian reproduction that Aristophanes mentions in his Frogs of 405 BC came during another war. The modern productions in 1993 and 2003 responded explicitly to the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq. Aeschylus built a vessel that carries new meanings without losing its original ones.

• 6. Afterlives of the Play

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  Seventy years after The Persians premiered, Aristophanes gave it perhaps the most pointed review in theatre history. In his comedy Frogs, staged in 405 BC, he has Aeschylus describe the play as "an effective sermon on the will to win. Best thing I ever wrote." Dionysus in the same scene says he loved the bit where they sang about the great Darius, and the chorus raised their hands and cried "Wah! Wah!"

  The play remained popular through the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, both of which had their own conflicts with Persian powers. Modern Greece has maintained a particular attachment to it. At an Athens production in 1965, according to Anthony Podlecki, the audience rose to its feet en masse and interrupted the actors' dialogue with cheers.

  Hiero of Syracuse, according to a scholium at Aristophanes' Frogs 1028, invited Aeschylus to reproduce The Persians in Sicily at some point after the original production. That detail suggests the play was understood even in antiquity as a work worth exporting to new political contexts.

  Aeschylus' drama was a direct model for Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1821 Hellas: A Lyrical Drama, his final published poetical work before his death in 1822. T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, echoed line 432 of the Messenger's account. The line in Eliot reads: "I had not thought Death had undone so many." The source in The Persians reads: "However, you can be sure that so great a multitude of men never perished in a single day." Eliot was also drawing on Dante's Inferno, Canto III, but the Persian root runs underneath both.

  In more recent literature, Dimitris Lyacos quoted directly from the Messenger's account in his dystopian epic Z213: Exit, using the Greek lines about soldiers faint from thirst and exhaustion to evoke military failure in a post-apocalyptic setting. The excerpts enter a context of broken syntax that mirrors a landscape shattered by war.

• 7. Modern Stagings

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  Peter Sellars directed a production of The Persians at the Edinburgh Festival and the Los Angeles Festival in 1993, explicitly framing it as a response to the Gulf War of 1990-1991. The production used a new translation by Robert Auletta and opened at the Royal Lyceum Theatre on the 16th of August 1993. Hamza El Din composed and performed the music, with additional contributions from Ben Halley Jr. and sound design by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger. Dunya Ramicova designed the costumes and James F. Ingalls the lighting. Cordelia Gonzalez played Atossa, Howie Seago the Ghost of Darius, and John Ortiz played Xerxes.

  Ellen McLaughlin translated Persians in 2003 for Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre in New York, responding this time to George Bush's invasion of Iraq. Len Cariou played Darius and Michael Stuhlbarg played Xerxes.

  Also in 2010, Kaite O'Reilly's translation was staged by National Theatre Wales on Sennybridge Training Area, an active military range in the Brecon Beacons. Audiences had to shift their attention between the surrounding landscape, the history of the site, and the ancient text being performed. O'Reilly won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for the translation, with the prize presented by the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

  Aaron Poochigian's 2010 translation included for the first time the detailed notes Aeschylus himself created to direct lines to specific parts of the chorus, marking which sections went to the strophe and which to the antistrophe. Using that edition, the play was presented in a staged read-through at New York's WorkShop Theater Company in the Spring of 2011.

  On the 25th of July 2020, on the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Salamis, Persians became the first ancient Greek tragedy performed at the open-air theatre of Epidaurus, live-streamed internationally via YouTube. The Hellenic National Theatre production was directed by Dimitrios Lignadis and delivered in both Ancient and Modern Greek, with English subtitles projected on the stream. In March 2024, Dublin's Abbey Theatre staged the first Irish language translation of the play, by the poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.