Aeschylus

Aeschylus the classical Greek tragedian of Athens (c. 525-456 BC), the earliest of the three great writers of Attic tragedy and often called the father of that art, whose surviving plays, especially the Oresteia, rank among the foundational works of Western drama.

Life and Career

Aeschylus was born around 525 BC at Eleusis, near Athens, into a noble family connected with the celebrated mysteries celebrated there. He fought in the Persian Wars, taking part in the battle of Marathon in 490 BC and probably also at Salamis, and his experience of the great struggle between Greece and Persia shaped the moral and political vision of his dramas. He began competing in the dramatic festivals early in the fifth century and won his first victory at the City Dionysia around 484 BC.

He spent time at the court of Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily, where he produced plays, and he died at Gela in Sicily in 456 BC. His epitaph was said to commemorate him as a soldier and a patriot rather than as a poet. By tradition he authored around seventy to ninety plays, of which only seven survive complete. Those seven, together with fragments preserved by quotation, are enough to reveal a dramatist of colossal ambition, whose imagination reaches from the origins of the cosmos to the founding of Athens itself.

The Oresteia and the Development of Drama

Aeschylus' masterpiece is the Oresteia, the only complete surviving tragic trilogy, comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. It traces the bloody chain of murder and vendetta within the house of Atreus, from the killing of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra to the avenging of his death by their son Orestes and the transformation of the pursuing Furies into benevolent powers of the city. The trilogy moves from tribal blood feud toward the establishment of civic justice at Athens.

It resolves the cycle of violence through a trial in which human judgment and divine authority are reconciled, and it is at once a family tragedy, a religious meditation and a founding myth of the Athenian legal order, ending with the reintegration of the Furies into the fabric of the city. Aeschylus is credited with major innovations in staging and composition. He increased the number of actors in a play and gave dialogue greater prominence, and he is traditionally said to have made bold use of costumes, machinery and the chorus of fifty or twelve.

Persians, Thebes and Prometheus

Among the other surviving plays, The Persians, produced in 472 BC, is unique in Greek drama for taking its subject from recent history, an account of the Persian defeat at Salamis as seen from the court of the Persian king. Its empathy for the conquered enemy and its warning against arrogance have made it a powerful meditation on war and its costs. The Seven Against Thebes dramatises the assault on Thebes and the deaths of the brothers Eteocles and Polynices, extending the theme of family curse and civil conflict.

The Suppliant Women, probably the earliest surviving play, portrays the daughters of Danaus seeking asylum from forced marriage, raising questions about refuge, consent and the authority of the city. Prometheus Bound, of disputed authorship, depicts the punishment of the Titan who stole fire for humanity and defied Zeus. Its portrait of heroic resistance to tyranny, and of a universe governed by a young and harsh power, has fascinated writers from the romantics onward, and its imagery has entered the language of political resistance.

Religion, Justice and Grandeur

Aeschylus' theatre is religious at its core. He writes under the shadow of Zeus and of an overarching order in which transgression is punished, often across generations, and human suffering is bound up with guilt inherited and committed. Yet that order is not merely cruel; his trilogy ends with reconciliation and the marriage of divine power to civic institution. His thought is preoccupied with justice, arrogance and the limits of human power.

The sin of hubris, of overstepping the bounds set for mortals, recurs throughout his work, and the characters who offend against measure are brought low by fate and by the gods. The grand and sombre conception of a moral universe gives his plays their monumental weight. His language is dense, elevated and full of startling images, and his choral odes are among the most magnificent poetry of the ancient world. Later antiquity found him obscure and awe-inspiring, and his style inspired poets and translators with its grandeur and difficulty.

Influence and Legacy

Aeschylus stands at the beginning of the European dramatic tradition and shaped the form that his successors inherited. His introduction of the second actor, the expansion of dialogue, his trilogy form and the scope of his spectacle established the possibilities of tragedy, and his Oresteia has been called the masterpiece of the genre. His influence reaches far beyond the theatre into the broader culture of the West.

His vision of law emerging from blood feud, of justice as a hard-won achievement rather than an original condition, has informed legal and political thought, and his tragedy has been invoked by poets, philosophers and modern dramatists from Shelley to the present day. The plays are still performed and studied as works of extraordinary power, and the Oresteia in particular has been adapted and reinterpreted for stage and screen. He is remembered as the father of tragedy, the poet-soldier who gave the art its scale and moral seriousness.

See also

• Oresteia
• Agamemnon
• Prometheus Bound
• The Persians