According to the ancient headnote (‘Hypothesis’), The Persians was produced in 472 BC, as the second play in a four-play production that won first prize; it is thus, if the currently accepted dating of The Suppliants to the 460s is correct, the earliest surviving European drama. The sponsor (choregos) who financed the production was none other than Pericles, later to be the greatest political leader of democratic Athens and then about twenty-three years old. Pericles’ father, Xanthippus, had played a notable role in the Persian war. In 479, as Athenian naval commander (in succession to Themistocles), he had led the Athenian contingent at the victorious battle of Mycale. His Peloponnesian allies had then abandoned the campaign, but Xanthippus had gone on to capture Sestos on the Hellespont, and from there he had brought home to Athens, for dedication in a sanctuary, the cables of the bridge of boats by which Xerxes’ army had crossed the straits.1 It is doubtless no coincidence that our play has a great deal to say about this bridge.2
The Persians was not the first tragedy to take its subject from recent events instead of from those of heroic times. Aeschylus’ great predecessor Phrynichus had done the same thing at least twice. In 493 or 492 he had produced The Capture of Miletus, highlighting the calamity that had befallen this famous Ionian city, a calamity for which many Athenians felt Athens was partly to blame, having withdrawn its support from the Ionians rebelling against Persian rule; for this Phrynichus was fined, and all further performance of the play was prohibited.3 Much later, probably in 476, Phrynichus had staged a production at least part of which was devoted to the Graeco-Persian war;4 he had invited his audience to view the war from the enemy’s standpoint, not as a triumph for the Greeks but as a disaster for the Persians (and their subject nations). The plays, especially The Phoenician Women, were long remembered for the beauty of their lyrics.5 It is likely that Phrynichus’ choregos for this production had been Themistocles, the hero of Salamis and creator of the fleet that had gained victory there.6
Phrynichus probably died not very long before the production of The Persians. The opening words of Aeschylus’ play are a near-quotation from the opening of the corresponding play of Phrynichus’ production; it is unlikely that Aeschylus would have chosen to pay such a compliment to a living rival, and there is no evidence of Phrynichus being alive at any later date. Aeschylus thus was advertising that he was following in Phrynichus’ footsteps, but we can be sure that his treatment of the theme was very different from that of his older contemporary.
In particular, whereas Phrynichus had spread the story over at least two (possibly three) plays,7 Aeschylus concentrated it into one. In the play of Phrynichus’ production (probably The Righteous Men)8 whose opening line Aeschylus imitated, ‘the defeat of Xerxes’ – this must mean Salamis, the only Greek victory over the Persians at which Xerxes was present in person – was already known about in the Persian capital and was mentioned in the prologue speech; it is plausible therefore to suppose that The Phoenician Women came first, and that in the course of that play the Chorus learned of the disaster of Salamis and of their own widowhood. The depth of their grief, and the poignancy of its expression, can well be imagined. Perhaps in the following play, as Persia struggled to recover from Salamis (and with Xerxes now back home?), word may have arrived of the crowning catastrophe of Plataea.
Aeschylus ingeniously reshaped these elements into a new and much tauter package. He took from Phrynichus’ second play the Chorus of Persian councillors, with a council meeting (140–45) as the first significant event, but like Phrynichus’ first play, this one begins with the fate of Xerxes’ expedition still unknown, and the shattering news of Salamis9 arrives in the course of the play. Few will then have expected to hear of Plataea too, but Aeschylus contrived to include it by having the ghost of Darius summoned up from below and making him deliver a precise prophecy of the coming defeat, even though he is represented as at first knowing nothing of what has happened at Salamis. Then, and only then, a humiliated Xerxes returns home, apparently in rags – in the sharpest contrast to the elaborate, costly robes of his councillors, and those in which we have just seen his father clad;10 the feminine laments with which The Phoenician Women so abounded are put in the mouths of the male Xerxes and the male Chorus – for, as Edith Hall has shown, the image of the Persian male has been systematically feminized all through the play.11
But although Aeschylus thus concentrated the substance of Phrynichus’ two (or three) plays into one, he may nevertheless have suffused his entire production with the glow of the great Greek victory over the barbarian. The production of 472 is the only one by Aeschylus12 that is known to have consisted of four plays whose stories were, on the face of it, unrelated – indeed, they were not even placed in proper chronological order. The first play was Phineus, about an episode in the saga of the Argonauts. This was followed by The Persians; then, jumping back to the heroic age, by Glaucus of Potniae, about a man who subjected his horses to an unnatural training regime13 and was devoured by them after crashing in a chariot race; and then by a satyr play about Prometheus (Prometheus the Fire-Bearer or Fire-Kindler).14 Repeated efforts have been made to find method behind the apparent madness of this arrangement, so far with little success.
I have recently suggested15 that the unifying feature of this production, or at least of its first three plays, was nothing other than the Persian war itself. In the first play, Phineus, a famous prophet, may have foretold the providential storm that wrecked much of the Persian fleet shortly before the simultaneous battles of Artemisium and Thermopylae in 480;16 that storm was the work of the North Wind (Boreas), and it was the sons of Boreas who saved Phineus from starvation by chasing away the Harpies who had constantly been snatching his food from his very lips. The third play, Glaucus of Potniae, seems to have included a reference to the town of Himera in Sicily; this place had nothing whatever to do with the story of Glaucus but had been the scene of a famous victory by the Sicilian Greeks over the Carthaginians in 480,17 so this play too may have contained a prophecy about a distant future which to its audience was the recent past.18 Thus each of the first three plays of this production would have narrated and/or foretold an important episode or episodes in the defeat of the great barbarian invasions of 480/ 79.19 We do not know enough about the fourth play to be able to determine whether it too followed this pattern.
The production of a tragedy (indeed, if the suggestion made above is correct, of a whole trilogy) about events of a war that was still in progress – a play, moreover, which, while it did not mention any individual Athenian, alluded clearly enough to the exploits of Xanthippus and especially of Themistocles (353–63, not to mention the whole great narrative of his victory at Salamis) – has inevitably caused speculation as to whether it might have been designed to have some political impact, particularly in light of the earlier production by Phrynichus on the same subject. It is known that Themistocles was banished by ‘ostracism’ at some time in the late 470s, but it is not known precisely when; all the same, even if this occurred later than 472, it was probably not his enemies’ first attempt to get rid of him.20 Both Themistocles and (when he entered politics) Pericles were opponents of the other outstanding political figure of this period, Cimon,21 who had gained great prestige in the previous few years by the capture of Eion and Scyros and the restoration to Athens of the bones of Theseus.22 So it is certainly not impossible that there was some political motivation behind the production of this particular play at this particular time.
There was certainly political motivation behind the restaging that took place at Syracuse, probably a year or two later, at the invitation of its tyrant Hieron.23 Hieron had taken part in the victory of Himera alongside his brother Gelon (who had been the ruler of Syracuse at that time), and it is reasonable to suppose – though we have no actual evidence – that Aeschylus was asked to, and did, produce Glaucus of Potniae in Sicily as well.
The Persians is not, however, primarily a play about a Greek triumph; it is a play about a Persian disaster. The empire, so we are given to understand, has lost almost the whole of its young manhood, and the horrors are piled on: the bodies floating in the waters around Salamis or lying on its beaches (272–7, 306–17, 419–21, 568–78, 595–7, 965–6, 977), the helpless swimmers clubbed to death ‘as if they were tunny or some other catch of fish’ (424–8), the Persian élite corps hacked down to the last man (459–64), the ravages of hunger and thirst on the retreat (482–91), the drowning masses in the freezing-cold Strymon (504–7), the ‘heaps of corpses’ at Plataea (818) – and so far as we (or the Persians back home) are told, all these thousands of dead were left unburied.24 But while full credit is given to the courage and patriotism of the Greeks,25 the defeat is not presented as being due to any inherent Persian or ‘barbarian’ inferiority. When the ghost of Darius advises the Persians not to march against Greece again, his reason is not that Persians cannot match Greeks in fighting qualities, but that ‘their country itself fights as their ally… by starving to death a multitude that is too vastly numerous’ (792–4); even at Salamis the Persian fleet is defeated only because it is caught in narrow waters when the crews are tired from a futile all-night patrol. The two characters of whom we see the most, the mother of King Xerxes and the ghost of his deceased father, are both presented positively. The Queen is as loving a mother as can be found anywhere in the tragic corpus, and Darius, both when he is present on stage and when his past achievements are remembered, appears as a wise and glorious ruler, his notorious failures, especially the invasion of Scythia,26 being ignored; all his predecessors likewise are presented in either favourable or neutral terms (765–73) – except the ‘disgrace[ful]’ Mardus, who was quickly removed (774–9). The Persian catastrophe is not due to the inherent characteristics of Persians but exclusively to the rashness of Xerxes and the advisers to whom he chose to listen. That, in turn, is largely due to Xerxes’ youth (782), which Aeschylus considerably exaggerates27 – though also to the Persian political system, in which the King was an absolute ruler who could not be held to account for any failure (213–14) and who (so the play assumes) was regarded by his subjects as a god (157, cf. 80; this special status of Persian royalty is signalled in this translation by the frequent capitalization of ‘king’ and ‘queen’). The Athenians, in contrast, ‘are not called slaves or subjects to any man’ (242) and function as a collectivity throughout: none of their leaders is named, not even Themistocles, whereas we are treated to three long catalogues of Xerxes’ subordinate commanders (21–59, 302–28, 957–99) containing about fifty different names.
Absolute monarchy, of course, was not unknown in the Greek world, and Aeschylus himself had grown up in an Athens ruled by the tyrant Hippias. And there are various indications that his audience were not expected to sit back and reflect smugly that this kind of catastrophic folly was only possible among benighted barbarians. In the Queen’s dream (181–99), the two women representing Greece and Persia are sisters (185–6), apparently equal in stature and beauty, differing only in their clothing and their willingness to submit to servitude: that one of them is ‘Greek’ and the other ‘barbarian’ is due merely to the ‘fall of the lot’ (186–7). We have already been reminded that Xerxes himself is actually of Greek ancestry, a descendant of Perseus ‘begotten of gold’ (79–80). And the sonorous list of territories gained by Darius and lost by Xerxes (868–903) corresponds almost exactly28 to the regions whose Greek cities, by 472, had become members of an alliance (now often called the ‘Delian League’) under the hegemony of Athens. If Athens was now following Persia’s path to glory, might it later follow Persia’s path to disaster?
The answer might seem obvious. Xerxes – as his mother, his father and the Chorus agree – had committed an act of mad foolishness when, disregarding his father’s instructions, he had invaded Europe when Persia’s destiny was to rule over Asia. But neither in actual history, nor in the edited version of history with which Aeschylus presents us was it obvious to anyone without the blessings of hindsight. In the catalogue of lost territories just mentioned, sixteen of the twenty areas named are across the sea from Asia – either on islands or on the European mainland – and three more are partly so;29 in other words, and even ignoring the Scythian expedition, most of what Xerxes had done Darius had done also. Nor could any Athenian forget – and Aeschylus reminds them several times (236, 244, 287–9, 475) – that Darius had sent an expedition against Athens too, the expedition that had been defeated at Marathon. How was Xerxes to know that his attempt to conquer Greece was against the will of the gods? We hear of no warning they had given him, only of his father’s advice, and he knew as well as we do that his father was not infallible. The gods tempt men to overreach themselves, to their ultimate ruin (93–100), and they give men no sure way of knowing what is, and what is not, overreaching.30 Any individual, or any community,31 with Xerxes’ power might find themselves making Xerxes’ error, if the gods were so minded. With at least some of his audience, Aeschylus may well have succeeded in the seemingly impossible feat of inducing them to feel compassion and pity for the man who had sacked and burned Athens, and for the great nation which, in the play,32 he brings to ruin.
1. Herodotus 8.131.3; 9.90–106, 114, 120–21 (the dedication of the cables is the very last event in his main narrative).
2. Persians 65–73, 112–13, 130–31, 722–5, 745–50.
3. Herodotus 6.21.2. Presumably the prohibition referred to possible performances at local festivals; it was to be many years before anyone thought of producing the same play a second time at the City Dionysia itself.
4. Our sources, including the ‘Hypothesis’ to The Persians, mostly refer in this connection to Phrynichus’ Phoenician Women, but the list of his plays in the medieval lexicon, the Suda, also mentions another play for which it offers three alternative titles – The Righteous Men, The Persians and The Committee (lit. ‘men sitting together’). Probably the title The Phoenician Women, being that of the best-known play in the production, was sometimes applied to the whole of it.
5. Cf. Aristophanes, Wasps 219–20 (produced in 422).
6. It is known that Phrynichus won a victory, with Themistocles as choregos, in this year (Plutarch, Themistocles 5.5); there is no proof that this victory was gained with his Persian war plays, but the parallel with Pericles’ sponsorship of Aeschylus’ production, and the unlikelihood that a shrewd politician like Themistocles would miss the opportunity for self-promotion that such a production on such a subject would provide, raise a strong presumption that it was.
7. That our sources tell us of only two relevant plays of his is of no significance: we only know the titles of ten plays of Phrynichus altogether, from a career that may have lasted nearly forty years.
8. The ‘Hypothesis’ says it was The Phoenician Women, but the scene it describes, with a eunuch ‘spreading <fleeces or textiles over> chairs for the assessors of the ruling power’, is clearly one of preparation for a meeting of Persian councillors and surely therefore must come from the play that was named after them.
9. All the more shattering because, up to that point, the Persians at home seem entirely unaware that the Greeks have a navy at all; we have heard of the Persian fleet (19, 39, 55, 76, 83), but the Greeks are thought of simply as spear-fighters (85, 148–9, 240), and the information about Athens which the elders give the Queen (231–44) includes not a word about ships.
10. There has earlier been a similar contrast between the robes of the Queen at her first, vehicle-borne entrance (150ff.) and the simple garb in which she returns, ‘without my carriage and without my former luxury’ (607–8).
11. See E. M. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford 1989), pp. 81–6 (cf. pp. 126–9, 209–10 on the effeminacy of the ‘barbarian’ in later Greek tragedy).
12. Though Aristias in 467 put on a production in which a Perseus was followed, with or without another play intervening, by a Tantalus – two heroes who had no mythical connection with each other at all except that both were sons of Zeus.
13. Either by feeding them on human flesh or by not allowing them to mate (the accounts vary).
14. For the principal fragments of these plays, and discussion of their likely content, see pp. 48–56.
15. ‘The Persian War Tetralogy of Aeschylus’, in J. Davidson and D. Rosenbloom, eds, Greek Drama IV (London forthcoming); an Italian version was published earlier in Dioniso n.s. 7 (2008).
16. Herodotus 7.188–92.
17. On the same day, it was believed, as the victory over the Persians at Salamis (Herodotus 7.166). Some contemporary Greeks too may already have believed, as some later Greeks certainly did (Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 11.1.4–5), that the Persians and the Carthaginians had preconcerted their simultaneous attacks on the independent Greek states of Greece and Sicily respectively.
18. The speaker may have been Poseidon, the god of all things equestrian; his relevance to the story of Glaucus is obvious, and we know that at Himera the Carthaginian commander, Hamilcar, had been killed while making a sacrifice to him – killed, too, by Syracusan cavalry (Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 11.21.4–22.1).
19. Salamis, Plataea and Himera are likewise mentioned together in Pindar’s First Pythian (75–80), performed before Hieron of Syracuse (brother of the victor of Himera) at his newly founded city of Aetna in 470.
20. Before any particular individual could be ostracized (banished for ten years without loss of property), three hurdles had to be surmounted: (i) the Assembly had to vote that an ostracism be held; (ii) at a special Assembly held some two months later, a total of at least six thousand votes had to be cast; (iii) the person who had the most votes against him would then be ostracized. There may have been one or several attempts at ostracizing Themistocles which failed at the first or second hurdle, before the one that finally succeeded.
21. Who appears to have been a patron of Sophocles (Plutarch, Cimon 8.7–9; Life of Sophocles 5).
22. Thucydides 1.98.1–2; Plutarch, Cimon 8.5–7.
23. We know of this restaging from an ancient commentator on Aristophanes’ Frogs (line 1028) who cites a treatise On Comedies by the great third-century scholar Eratosthenes.
24. This appears to be largely true. In wars between Greeks, it was usual for the winners of a land battle to grant the losers, on request, a truce to enable them to remove their dead for burial; but of Plataea we are told that the Persian dead were left where they lay until their flesh had rotted away or been stripped by animals and birds, after which the bones were ‘brought together to one place’ (Herodotus 9.83.2), with (apparently) the sole exception of their commander Mardonius, who was buried secretly, probably by a loyal Ionian Greek (Herodotus 9.84).
25. And not only the Athenians; the victory of Plataea, in which Aeschylus and many of his audience had fought, is ascribed in the play to ‘the Dorian spear’ (817), i.e. to the Spartans.
26. See Herodotus 4.1–142.
27. If we had no other source of information, we would certainly suppose from Aeschylus’ presentation of Xerxes that he was in his twenties when he invaded Greece; in fact he was the first legitimate son born to Darius after Darius came to the throne in 521 (Herodotus 7.2.2) and cannot have been far short of forty in 480.
28. With the exception of Cyprus (894–6).
29. The regions of the Hellespont, the Propontis and ‘the mouth of the Black Sea’ (876–9), all of which had Greek communities both on the European and on the Asian sides. The only wholly Asian region in the list is Ionia (897–900).
30. Cf. A. F. Garvie, Lexis 17 (1999), pp. 21–40.
31. Aeschylus knew that communities, including democratic communities, are as subject to the temptations and the arrogance of power as individuals are: ‘… what man,’ he makes the Furies sing in The Eumenides (522–5), ‘that does not at all nourish his heart on fear – or what community of men, it makes no difference – will still revere Justice?’
32. In reality, of course, the Persian Empire remained very much a going concern, despite the losses of territory and revenue it had suffered on its western fringes.