This book is based on my three-volume edition with translation of the plays and fragments of Aeschylus in the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press in 2008; I am most grateful both to the Trustees of the Press and to Penguin Books for making it possible for me to bring out my translation of four of the seven surviving plays (together with the fragments of other plays which are known, or which can be assumed with reasonable confidence, to have been produced on the same occasions) in a form more likely to appeal to a broader and less specialized readership. The translation itself is identical with that which appeared in the Loeb volumes. May it help to spread the understanding and appreciation of one who was both a great dramatist and a great democrat.
A.H.S.