Aeschylus is traditionally thought to have been born in 525/4 BC, at Eleusis in western Attica, a town famous as the home of the immensely popular Mystery cult of Demeter and Persephone. His father, Euphorion, is reported to have been of aristocratic birth, and it is at any rate certain that in later years the family followed the lifestyle of the leisured class: about a dozen surviving vase inscriptions, datable in or around the 440s, proclaim, in the traditional manner of Greek upper-class homoeroticism, the beauty of Aeschylus’ younger son Euaeon.
Aeschylus made his debut in the tragic competition at the annual City Dionysia festival sometime between 499 and 496. Three outstanding practitioners, Pratinas, Choerilus and Phrynichus, were already active, and the newcomer was not to win first prize for another twelve or fifteen years. It is uncertain whether any plays from this early period of his activity were preserved for posterity to read: of the work of Phrynichus, far more popular at the time, only some late plays seem to have survived into later generations. Perhaps it was not until a few years later, possibly in the early or middle 480s, that the scripts of tragic dramas began to be copied and preserved.
Before then, and before Aeschylus at last reached the top rank of his profession in 484, when he won the City Dionysia tragic competition for the first time, had come what he himself seems to have regarded as the defining event of his life: the defeat of the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490. Aeschylus fought in the battle, and one of the 192 Athenian dead was his brother: ‘In this struggle… Cynegeirus son of Euphorion seized hold of an enemy ship by the sternpost, and fell when his hand was severed by an axe’ (Herodotus, Histories 6.114). Aeschylus is also reported to have taken part in the battles of Salamis and Plataea in 480/79; this is plausible enough, since Athens put forth its maximum effort in both campaigns, and his presence at Salamis is confirmed by a contemporary who knew him personally, Ion of Chios. This gives his account of the battle in The Persians, produced eight years later, a unique status: there is perhaps no other battle in ancient history of which we possess a substantial eyewitness account written down so soon after the event for the ears of an audience most of whom had been eyewitnesses themselves.
From 484 to the end of his career, Aeschylus won first prize thirteen times in all;1 especially after the death of Phrynichus, he may have been victorious almost every time he competed. By now tragedy was becoming prestigious enough for an embryo reading public to have come into existence, perhaps at this stage mainly confined to other literary artists in Athens and elsewhere, so that some scripts of plays from this period survived for later generations. We cannot, however, identify the plays concerned, since with one possible exception2 we have no information that could enable us to date, even approximately, any particular Aeschylean play produced before 472.
It may well have been in 473 that Phrynichus died, after a career of some forty years; at any rate Aeschylus, feeling himself Phrynichus’ successor, began his Persians, produced in the spring of 472, with a salute to Phrynichus’ memory in the form of a near-quotation of the opening line of his play of a few years earlier on the same theme. This production by Aeschylus, financed by the young Pericles, won first prize.
There is ancient evidence, going back to Eratosthenes (third century BC), that The Persians was produced again at Syracuse under the auspices of its ruler Hieron; there is reason to believe that this visit took place in 470 and that it also featured the production of The Women of Aetna. This was the year when Hieron, on winning the chariot race at the Pythian Games, caused his name to be proclaimed not as ‘Hieron of Syracuse’ but as ‘Hieron of Aetna’ – Aetna being the name (taken from that of the volcano) he had given to the city of Catana (now Catania) when he had refounded and repeopled it five or six years before. The lyric poet Pindar, celebrating Hieron’s success in the ode now known as the First Pythian, recalled the victories achieved over the Persians by Athens at Salamis and by Sparta at Plataea and linked them with the almost simultaneous victory of Hieron and his brother Gelon over the Carthaginians at Himera as having ‘pulled Greece back from grievous servitude’.3 It would chime very well with this publicity campaign on Hieron’s part if he also sponsored productions, by the greatest dramatist of the day, of one play (maybe two) celebrating the recent victories over the ‘barbarians’4 and another providing the city of Aetna with the prestige of a mythological past. Perhaps one production was put on at Syracuse and the other at Aetna itself.
At about the same time, a new tragic dramatist, Sophocles, nearly thirty years younger than Aeschylus, was making his debut. Plutarch, in his life of Cimon (8.8–9), tells a story set at the City Dionysia of 468. Sophocles, he says, was putting on his first production; there were quarrels and fierce partisanship among the spectators; the presiding magistrate, instead of selecting judges for the contest by lot as was usual, invited the ten generals (one of whom was Cimon) to act as judges, and they awarded the first prize to Sophocles. Plutarch implies, and the ancient Life of Aeschylus explicitly states, that Aeschylus was one of the defeated competitors. There is independent evidence that Sophocles won his first victory in 468, but the participation of Aeschylus in that contest may be a later ‘improvement’ of the story, as may be the claim that this was Sophocles’ first production: certainly Plutarch does not inspire our confidence here when he ascribes Aeschylus’ final departure from Athens (which did not occur till a decade later) to pique at this defeat! At any rate, in the following year, 467, Aeschylus won first prize with Laius, Oedipus, Seven Against Thebes and The Sphinx, defeating two sons of famous fathers, Aristias son of Pratinas (who competed with his father’s plays, Pratinas having presumably died not long before) and Polyphrasmon son of Phrynichus; and in an uncertain year, probably also in the 460s, he won with The Egyptians, The Suppliants, The Danaids and Amymone,5 defeating Sophocles and Mesatus. One play has survived from each of these two productions.
In the late 460s, substantial alterations seem to have been made both in the rules of the dramatic competition and in the physical environment in which it took place (see below, pp. xviii–xix), including the introduction of a third speaking actor.6 These changes are reflected in the Oresteia, produced in 458, and also in Prometheus Bound, whether that is a late play of Aeschylus or a work of another hand falsely ascribed to him.
The Oresteia, which won first prize at the City Dionysia in the spring of 458, appears to have been Aeschylus’ last production in Athens; it is also the only connected suite of Aeschylean plays to survive complete.7 Not long afterwards he again travelled to Sicily. As he was never to return, legends later grew up about his having become estranged from his Athenian public, but no credence need be given to these. We do not know who invited him to Sicily (Hieron was now dead), nor how many cities he visited, nor what plays he produced, nor what plays he had prepared for production at Athens after his anticipated return; only that he died and was buried at Gela in 456/5. An epitaph is preserved which the ancient biographer of Aeschylus ascribes to ‘the people of Gela’, though another tradition held it to be by Aeschylus himself. It may be translated thus:
At Gela, rich in wheat, he died, and lies beneath this stone:
Aeschylus the Athenian, son of Euphorion.
His valour, tried and proved, the mead of Marathon can tell,
The long-haired Persian also, who knows it all too well.
One is entitled to be sceptical about the authenticity of ancient poets’ epitaphs (all the more so when they are said to have written them themselves), but in this case there is cause to be sceptical about scepticism. It is hard to believe that anyone at a later date would have concocted an epitaph for Aeschylus that made not even the most distant allusion to his art.8 Aeschylus, to be sure, can hardly have himself composed an epitaph that specified the place of his death; but it will probably have been commissioned by the Geloans from a member of his family, and its wording will have been in accordance with what his family knew had meant most to him, commemorating him not as a poet but as a loyal and courageous Athenian who had fought that Athens might still be free.
Scepticism is rather more in order about a number of other anecdotes, mostly undated, that figure in Aeschylus’ ancient biography. Only one of these is worth recording here, mainly because of its early attestation; it is referred to casually by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics (1111a8–10) as if already well known: ‘[The doer of an act] may not realize what he is doing; as people say they were “carried away while speaking”, or “did not know it was a secret” (as in the case of Aeschylus and the Mysteries).’ This implies that Aeschylus was at some time accused, formally or informally, of having divulged secrets, connected with the Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, that were supposed to be concealed from all except initiates of the cult. An ancient commentator on Aristotle specifies five plays (none of which have survived) in which Aeschylus ‘seems’ to have done this, and quotes from Aristotle’s contemporary Heracleides Ponticus a sensational story of how Aeschylus narrowly escaped being put to death on stage for revealing such secrets, took refuge at the altar of Dionysus, and was eventually put on trial and acquitted, ‘mainly because of what he had done in the battle of Marathon’.
Eleusis was both Aeschylus’ home town and the home of the Mysteries, and Aristophanes in The Frogs exploits this connection to good effect: the Chorus of the play is composed of initiates enjoying a blissful afterlife in a privileged region of Hades, and Aeschylus’ prayer before his contest with Euripides is ‘Demeter who nurtured my mind, may I be worthy of thy Mysteries’ (Frogs 886–7). Some of the imagery in the Oresteia has been thought, probably rightly, to derive from this cult,9 though none of it is signalled as such (neither the Mysteries nor Eleusis nor even Demeter is mentioned anywhere in the trilogy), and none of it could reasonably be regarded as illicit divulgation, since no non-initiate could even be aware of its connotations. To judge by what Aristotle’s commentator says about the five other plays, their sole connection with the Mysteries, so far as later scholars could discover, consisted in some more than passing references to Demeter.
There is thus no reason to believe that Aeschylus was guilty of what he is said to have been accused of. It does not follow, however, that the story of the accusation is pure legend. It has been well said that ‘the adage that there is no smoke without fire is not applicable to the Athenian law courts’.10 There is good reason to believe that Aeschylus was a politically committed dramatist and a supporter successively of Themistocles, Ephialtes and Pericles;11 in the tense atmosphere of, say, the middle and late 460s, when Ephialtes and Pericles were seeking to undermine the ascendancy of Cimon through prosecutions,12 it is not inconceivable that Cimon or one of his associates tried to attack his rivals indirectly through a prosecution of a man in the public eye who was well known to be an associate of theirs, as twenty-five or thirty years later Pericles was attacked through prosecutions of friends of his who were well known to the public but not active in politics (the sculptor Pheidias, the philosopher Anaxagoras, Pericles’ mistress Aspasia).13 If so, Aeschylus was acquitted; had he been convicted, the penalty would certainly have been death, as it was in later cases in which similar charges were brought. It will not have taken long for the story to acquire the legendary embroidery found in later accounts.
Various ancient sources preserve sayings ascribed to Aeschylus, of varying degrees of credibility. The best attested is one that has no connection with his art: ‘When Aeschylus was watching a boxing contest at the Isthmian Games, and the spectators shouted out when one of the boxers was hit, he nudged Ion of Chios and said “Do you see what training does? The man who was struck is silent, and the spectators cry out!” ’ (Plutarch, Moralia 79e). Ion was a versatile fifth-century writer (of tragedy, among much else) who published a collection of reminiscences of famous people he had met; he was probably born in the late 480s and first visited Athens in the 460s.14 Our story implies that he and Aeschylus were visiting the Isthmian Games together, which suggests that they had become close friends.
The other sayings attributed to Aeschylus all relate to his art. Some of them are commonplaces that might fit any poet, but two have a degree of individuality. One tells of his polite refusal to compose a paean for the people of Delphi:
He said that there already existed an excellent one composed by Tynnichus, and that to put one of his own beside it would be like comparing a modern cult statue with an ancient one. The old images, crudely made as they were, were reckoned divine; the new ones, made with great artistry, were admired but did not give the same impression of divinity (Porphyry, On Abstinence 2.18).
The other is the only substantive comment he is recorded as having made on his tragedies: that they were ‘slices of fish taken from the great banquets of Homer’ (Athenaeus, Sophists at Dinner 8.347d). Both of these may perhaps likewise come from Ion of Chios. A small point in favour of their authenticity is that they share a tone of good-humoured self-deprecation. We do not know whether Aeschylus ever actually wrote paeans or other free-standing lyric poems, but in the Hellenistic period there circulated under his name at least two elegiac epitaphs and also a longer elegy in honour of those who died at Marathon. Different sources give figures ranging from seventy to ninety for the number of plays that Aeschylus composed. We know of eighty titles of plays attributed to him. It is sometimes uncertain whether two of these titles may not really be alternative names for the same play, and there is some evidence that there were one or two other Aeschylean plays whose titles happen not to be mentioned in our sources; all things considered, there appear to have been seventy-seven or seventy-eight plays known to scholars of the Hellenistic age which they regarded as the work of Aeschylus.15 One or two of these, notably The Women of Aetna, may never have been produced at Athens; the remaining seventy-six would be enough to make up nineteen four-play productions to compete at the City Dionysia festival, and, as we would expect from the regular practice of that competition (see below, p. xix), precisely nineteen out of the seventy-six appear to have been satyr plays and the remainder tragedies (that is, serious dramas, not necessarily ending in disaster).
Aeschylus’ earlier plays, including The Persians, Seven Against Thebes and The Suppliants, were performed under very simple conditions. The performing area consisted mainly of a dance floor (orchestra) large enough to accommodate comfortably the chorus (then consisting of twelve members, who normally marched and danced in a rectangular formation), the two actors playing individual roles, and any mute extras who might be needed. Somewhere in, or at the edge of, the orchestra there seems to have been an elevated mound, identified in The Persians as the tomb of Darius, in the other two plays as a sanctuary. The impression of an indoor scene could be given, when necessary, by setting out furniture, as apparently at the beginning of The Persians and also, we are told, in an earlier play by Phrynichus on the same subject. At each side of the orchestra was a passage by which performers could enter and leave.
In Prometheus Bound there are three actors (though only in the opening scene), and the theatrical arrangements are significantly more elaborate – though this does not in itself prove that the play is post-Aeschylean, since most if not all of the innovations are already to be found in the Oresteia. Some of the details are obscure and controversial, especially as regards the movements of the Chorus and the final cataclysm, but the evidence of many other plays makes the essentials clear. There was now a building (skene) behind the orchestra, which could be decorated with painted panels so as to represent a palace, a private house, a cave and so on; in Prometheus it represents the cliff to which Prometheus is bound. There were also two ‘special effects’ devices; one of these, the ekkyklema for the display of indoor scenes, is probably not used in Prometheus, but the other, the mechane, or flying-machine (also called, significantly, the geranos, or ‘crane’), was certainly used for the arrival and departure of Oceanus on his ‘four-legged bird’.
The performers, all of whom were male,16 were so attired that no part of their bodies was visible: they wore headpieces (combinations of masks and wigs) suited to the sex, status, age and so on of the characters they were impersonating, and close-fitting bodysuits over which they put on appropriate costumes. Aeschylus had, at least in later generations, a reputation for grandeur in costuming (Aristophanes, Frogs 1060–2), but he was quite capable of dressing a king in rags if the situation so demanded, as in the case of Xerxes.
It was regular in the fifth century for each dramatist competing for the tragic prize at the City Dionysia to produce four plays, normally three tragedies followed by a satyr drama, and Aeschylus and his contemporaries seem often to have composed for this purpose connected ‘tetralogies’ consisting of three tragedies presenting successive episodes of a single story and a satyr drama based on another part of the same or a very closely related myth. Thus in addition to the Oresteia, on the story of the murder of Agamemnon and the revenge taken by his son Orestes, Aeschylus composed a tetralogy based on the Iliad, one based on the Odyssey and at least eight others. Two of the four plays in this volume, Seven Against Thebes and The Suppliants, are known to have formed part of such tetralogies; Seven Against Thebes was the third play of its suite and therefore the last in the sequence of tragedies, but The Suppliants came either first or second in its production, so that its ending is more like the end of an episode in a serial than the end of a complete drama. The three plays produced with The Persians had, on the face of it, no connection in plot or theme either with The Persians or with each other, but it is arguable that at least two of them, perhaps all three, looked forward to the great recent conflict to which the central play was devoted. With only one play surviving complete from each of these three productions, we cannot hope to capture their full artistic impact, but I have translated the surviving fragments of the lost plays from these productions and tried to give some idea of what else they are likely to have contained.
Many passages in Prometheus Bound make predictions, promises or threats about the future, and the surviving fragments of Prometheus Unbound show that most if not all of what the former play had foreshadowed came to pass in the latter; moreover the two plays show many similarities of style and technique. It is thus almost certain that they were produced together, but there are no plausible candidates for the remaining slots in a connected tetralogy.17 I have translated the fragments, and discussed the likely content, of Prometheus Unbound. Thus this volume contains altogether four complete plays and the fragments of ten others.18
Aeschylus had two sons, Euphorion and Euaeon, both of whom themselves became tragic poets; Euphorion may indeed have been the real author of some of the plays that came to be attributed to his father (see below, pp. 159–60). The family’s professional tradition was thereafter continued by Aeschylus’ nephew Philocles (who defeated Sophocles when the latter produced Oedipus the King) and his descendants; one of these, Astydamas (II), was probably the most successful tragic dramatist of the mid-fourth century, and another, also named Astydamas (III), was a leading member of the Athenian actors’ guild as late as 278/7.
After Aeschylus’ death, a state decree was passed permitting anyone who wished to do so to produce his plays at the major dramatic festivals in competition with the works of living authors, and he may also, by the late fifth century, have become a school text.19 Before the fourth century was far advanced, however, Aeschylus had largely lost his popularity both in the theatre and with readers,20 though he was still regarded as a classic, and when in the 330s an official text of the major Athenian tragic poets was deposited in the state archives, Aeschylus was included along with Sophocles and Euripides.
In subsequent centuries Aeschylus continued to be recognized as a major author but more as a pioneer than a supreme master, Sophocles and especially Euripides being far more popular; a typical judgement is that of the first-century Roman rhetorician and educationist Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 10.1.66), who described Aeschylus as ‘elevated, solemn and grandiloquent – sometimes even to a fault – but on the whole primitive and uncouth’. Papyrus fragments show that a wide range of Aeschylean plays was still being read in Egypt towards the end of the second century AD, but it is surely significant that almost all those we have, outside of the seven plays that survive complete, seem to come from one man’s library in Oxyrhynchus. Two centuries later there can have been few collections like his in existence anywhere, and only the seven plays – the four in this volume, and the three tragedies of the Oresteia – survived into the early Middle Ages, and thence to our own time.
1. Each production comprised four plays, so that fifty-two of Aeschylus’ plays (perhaps about two-thirds of his total output) formed part of victorious productions.
2. This is the suite of plays (The Myrmidons, The Nereids and The Phrygians) based on the Iliad. These plays have often been thought to have inspired a series of vase paintings showing Achilles sitting muffled up in his cloak, as he is known to have done in at least one of the three plays. The paintings themselves cannot be precisely dated, but they tend to suggest that this was a fairly early production; indeed, it may well have been with this audacious series of dramas, aspiring to rival Homer himself, that Aeschylus won his first victory in 484.
3. See pp. 5–6, 49–52 on the possibility that Aeschylus worked into one of his other plays of 472, Glaucus of Potniae, a prophetic reference to the victory of Himera; if this is correct, of course, it is an almost inevitable inference that on this visit to Sicily Aeschylus produced Glaucus of Potniae too.
4. In an ancient Greek context ‘barbarian’ (barbaros) means ‘non-Greek’ or ‘non-Greek-speaking’.
5. On the questions of the dating and sequence of the Danaid plays, both of which are disputed, see pp. 109–14.
6. Aristotle in the Poetics (1449a15–17) regards Aeschylus as having been responsible for the introduction, much earlier, of a second speaking actor.
7. Except for its final part, the satyr drama Proteus. The Oresteia is translated in this series by Robert Fagles, with an introduction and notes by Fagles and W. B. Stanford (1977).
8. In addition, the epitaph contains a feature of vocabulary (the use of alsos, which normally means ‘grove’ or ‘sacred precinct’, in the sense of ‘level expanse’) which is not found either before or after the fifth century BC and is particularly characteristic of Aeschylus.
9. See A. M. Bowie, ‘Religion and Politics in Aeschylus’ Oresteia’, Classical Quarterly 43 (1993) pp. 10–31, at pp. 24–26, with references to earlier literature.
10. K. J. Dover, Aristophanes: Clouds (Oxford 1968), p. xx; Aristophanes: Frogs (Oxford 1993), p. 3.
11. See p. 6, and my fuller discussion in Aeschylean Tragedy (Bari 1996), pp. 391–421.
12. See Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 23.2; Plutarch, Cimon 14.3–5.
13. Plutarch, Pericles 31–2.
14. See M. L. West, ‘Ion of Chios’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 32 (1985), pp. 71–8; K. J. Dover, The Greeks and their Legacy (Oxford 1989), pp. 1–12.
15. Some of these may not in fact have been his work; see pp. 159–60; also M. L. West, Studies in Aeschylus (Stuttgart 1990), pp. 51–72, and ‘Iliad and Aethiopis on Stage: Aeschylus and Son’, Classical Quarterly 50 (2000), pp. 338–52.
16. It must often have been the case that the same actor took a male and a female part in the same play; thus in Prometheus Bound the actor who plays Io must earlier have played either Hephaestus or Power.
17. One might think of the satyr play usually referred to as Prometheus the Fire-Kindler, but that was part of the Persians production (see pp. 52–6).
18. These fragmentary remains of otherwise lost plays are of very varying extent. Of Prometheus Unbound we have in all, in Greek or in Cicero’s Latin, some 330 words of text; of The Egyptians, one single word.
19. In Plato’s discussion in the Republic (376c–398b) of the use and abuse of poetry in education, Aeschylus is the only individual poet other than Homer who is named or quoted; he can hardly have entered the school curriculum for the first time in the early fourth century, when he had gone almost completely out of fashion, so he is likely to have done so already in the fifth.
20. Aristotle’s Poetics naturally mentions Aeschylus in its potted history of the tragic genre (1449a 15–18) but otherwise almost ignores him.