Aeschylus

Greek playwright

• Born: 525-524 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Eleusis, Greece
• Died: 456-455 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Gela, Sicily (now in Italy)

Aeschylus’s dramaturgy marks a major stage in the development of Western theater, especially tragedy.

Early Life

Knowledge of the life of Aeschylus (EHS-kuh-luhs) is limited by minimal and unreliable sources. A Hellenistic biography surviving in the manuscript tradition of Aeschylus’s plays is filled with ancient gossip, conjecture, and elaboration. The only extant portraits of the dramatist are probably not authentic.

Aeschylus was born about 525-524 b.c.e. in Eleusis, an Attic town about fourteen miles northwest of Athens. His father, Euphorion, a eupatrid, or hereditary aristocrat, had several children: at least two other sons, Cynegirus and Ameinias, and a daughter whose name is not recorded.

As the son of a eupatrid, Aeschylus belonged to one of the ancient and powerful landed families who had controlled Greece for generations but whose political power deteriorated in Aeschylus’s lifetime, especially in Attica. Aeschylus’s birthplace was an ancient city that had retained a sense of local pride despite its incorporation into the city-state of Athens many years before. While it is uncertain whether Aeschylus was ever initiated into the famous cult of Demeter at Eleusis, he certainly grew up within its shadow. Later in life, Aeschylus is said to have been prosecuted for revealing a mystery of Demeter in one of his plays but to have been exonerated on the grounds that he had done so unwittingly.

The young Aeschylus, benefiting from the wealth and prestige of his family, undoubtedly received a good education founded on the poetry of Homer. With such learning, Aeschylus developed a strong sense of a eupatrid’s civic responsibility and authority and was exposed to the traditional poetry, myths, and music on which his tragedies were later based.

If ancient tradition can be trusted, Aeschylus began composing plays as a teenager. His early dramatic career is poorly documented. Sometime between 499 and 496, he entered the Athenian dramatic competition at the Greater Dionysia with an unknown group of plays but did not receive first prize. There is no record of how many contests he entered before his first victory in 484, again with unknown plays.

As an Athenian citizen, the young Aeschylus lived through some of the most exciting years in that city’s history. In the tightly knit aristocratic society of late sixth century Athens, Aeschylus would have observed at first hand the turmoil associated with the murder of the Athenian prince Hipparchus in 514, the expulsion of Hipparchus’s brother Hippias in 510, and the constitutional reforms of democratic Cleisthenes in 508. The progression from tyranny to democracy in Athens inevitably meant less power for the eupatrid class. While the political position of Aeschylus and his family in this period is uncertain, these events undoubtedly encouraged the cautious conservatism that Aeschylus exhibited in later years.

The young playwright was also a soldier. In the first decade of the fifth century, the Persian Empire ruthlessly suppressed a revolt by Ionian Greek cities along the coast of modern Turkey and then invaded the mainland of Greece in retaliation for support of the Ionians. In 490, the Persian king Darius the Great was soundly defeated by united Greek forces at the Battle of Marathon, where Aeschylus fought and where his brother Cynegirus died. Ten years later, during a second Persian invasion of Greece by Darius’s son, Xerxes I, Aeschylus also participated in the naval battle of Salamis, at which the Athenians defeated the Persian fleet against great odds. Accounts of Aeschylus’s participation in other battles, especially at Plataea in 479, must be dismissed as examples of biographical exaggeration. These victories permanently curtailed the threat of Persian domination of the Greek mainland and brought about the period of Athenian political hegemony during which Aeschylus produced all of his extant plays.

Life’s Work

While the titles of at least eighty Aeschylean plays are known, only seven tragedies survive in the Aeschylean corpus. As entries in the Greater Dionysia always consisted of three tragedies plus one satyr play, about three-quarters of Aeschylus’s plays were tragedies. Plots for these plays were generally connected with the Trojan War or with the myths of Thebes and Argos. At the height of his dramatic career, Aeschylus, who acted in his own plays, was extremely successful. Of the twenty-odd productions attributed to his name, he was victorious at least thirteen times, maybe more; in addition, several of his plays were produced after his death.

Aeschylus’s earliest extant work, Persai (472 b.c.e.; The Persians, 1777), was first performed in Athens in 472, together with the lost plays Phineus and Glaucus Potnieus. This production, which won first prize, commemorated the Athenian victory at Salamis and includes Aeschylus’s own eyewitness account, placed in the mouth of a messenger. In choosing historical rather than mythical subject matter for this play, Aeschylus followed a contemporary, Phrynichus, who had earlier composed two historical dramas. Aeschylus’s producer for his plays of 472 was Pericles, but the playwright’s association with this great Athenian statesman and champion of democracy is not necessarily an indication of Aeschylus’s political inclinations, for producers were assigned by the state, not chosen by the playwright.

Shortly after 472, at the invitation of the tyrant Hiero I, Aeschylus traveled to Syracuse in Sicily, where The Persians was reproduced. Hieron, a great patron of the arts, attracted to his court not only Aeschylus but also the philosopher Xenophanes and the poets Pindar, Bacchylides, and Simonides. During his stay in Sicily, which may have lasted several years, Aeschylus also produced another play, Aetnae, now lost. As this play celebrated Hiero’s founding of the city of Aetna in 476, a visit by Aeschylus to Sicily prior to 472 was once considered to have been likely, but most scholars now believe that Aetnae was produced sometime shortly after 472. Aeschylus’s long stay in Sicily left a permanent mark on the playwright’s work, which is filled with Sicilian words and expressions.

Aeschylus was certainly back in Athens by 468, for his unknown production of that year was defeated when Sophocles won his first victory at the Greater Dionysia. In the following year, Aeschylus won the competition with a group including the lost Laius and Oedipus and the extant Hepta epi Thēbas (467 b.c.e.; Seven Against Thebes, 1777).

Sometime between 467 and 458, Aeschylus produced the so-called Danaid trilogy, composed of the extant Hiketides (463 b.c.e.?; The Suppliants, also known as Suppliant Women, 1777) and the lost Egyptians and Danaids. For stylistic reasons, The Suppliants used to be considered Aeschylus’s earliest extant play, until the twentieth century publication of a papyrus fragment containing part of an ancient production notice for the play. This new evidence makes it likely that Aeschylus competed in 463 with the Danaid trilogy and was victorious over Sophocles.

In 458 Aeschylus directed his last Athenian production, which included the extant Agamemnōn (Agamemnon, 1777), Choēphoroi (Libation Bearers, 1777), and Eumenides (English translation, 1777) and the lost satyr play Proteus. Together, these three tragedies, known as the Oresteia, make up the only surviving connected trilogy. The Eumenides is filled with allusions to such events as the recent Athenian alliance with Argos and the reform of the ancient court of Areopagus by the democrat Ephialtes. This evidence has been interpreted to suggest both that Aeschylus supported and that he opposed the political agenda of Athens in the middle of the fifth century.

Shortly after this production, which won first prize, Aeschylus left Athens for Sicily, never to return. Ancients conjectured that the playwright left Athens because of political dissatisfaction or professional disappointment. None of the evidence is certain, however, and the reasons for Aeschylus’s second journey to Sicily remain obscure.

Some scholars believe that the seventh play surviving in the Aeschylus corpus, Prometheus desmōtēs (Prometheus Bound, 1777), was composed during Aeschylus’s second stay in Sicily. Others deny that the play was written by Aeschylus at all.

The playwright also wrote epigrams and elegies. Fragments of Aeschylus’s elegy composed in honor of the dead at Marathon were discovered in the Athenian agora in 1933. This poem is said to have been written for a competition, at an unknown date, which Aeschylus lost to the poet Simonides.

Aeschylus died in Gela, Sicily, in 456 or 455. An ancient biography recounts the following version of Aeschylus’s death: An eagle flying overhead with a tortoise in its beak mistook Aeschylus’s bald head for a rock on which to shatter the shell of its prey and thus killed the poet. The Gelans erected this inscription over the poet’s tomb:

This memorial hides the Athenian Aeschylus, Euphorion’s son,Who died in wheat-bearing Gela.The sacred battlefield of Marathon may tell of his great valor.So, too, can the long-haired Mede, who knows it well.

By tradition, Aeschylus himself is said to have requested that he be remembered only as a patriotic Athenian and not as a great playwright.

Aeschylus had at least two sons, Euphorion and Euaeon, both of whom wrote plays. In 431 Euphorion defeated both Sophocles and Euripides. A few years later, Sophocles, competing with his masterpiece, Oidipous tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715), was defeated by Aeschylus’s nephew Philocles. After Aeschylus’s death, a special decree was passed to permit revivals of his plays, which won several victories in subsequent years. In 405, the comic poet Aristophanes produced Batrachoi (The Frogs, 1780), in which the dead Aeschylus and Euripides debate the quality of each other’s tragedies.

Significance

Aeschylus is rightly considered the “father of Western tragedy.” His works, coming at a strategic time, helped mold Greek tragedy into a great literary form. While Aristotle’s statement in De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705) that Aeschylus “first introduced a second actor to tragedy and lessened the role of the chorus and made dialogue take the lead” cannot be proved, Aeschylus’s extant plays do illustrate a skilled use of dialogue, which made possible the agons, or great debates between characters so important in later Greek tragedy.

Whether Aeschylus himself introduced the second actor, he almost certainly invented the connected trilogy/tetralogy. As a rule, the group of three tragedies and one satyr play that a playwright produced at the festival were not connected thematically. It was Aeschylus who first saw the brilliant potential of linking the plays together. While his first extant play, The Persians, was not part of a connected group, all of his other surviving plays were. No other Greek playwright was able to make use of the trilogy form as successfully as Aeschylus did.

In The Suppliants, Aeschylus also experimented with the use of the chorus as dramatic protagonist. Traditionally a reflective and nondramatic element in the tragedy, the chorus became in this play the central character. Similarly, in Eumenides the chorus played a significant role as the prosecutor of the matricidal Orestes.

Aeschylus’s dramatic skills are particularly apparent in his handling of spectacular stage techniques. His plays, frequently making dramatic use of such stage trappings as altars, tombs, ghosts, and the eccyclema, a wheeled vehicle employed to show the interior, thus confirm Aeschylus as a master playwright who established for his successors a high standard of dramatic skill and power.

Bibliography

Herington, C. J. Aeschylus. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. An excellent introduction to Aeschylus for the general reader. One chapter is devoted to biography; includes a short annotated bibliography and a table of dates.

Lefkowitz, Mary. The Lives of the Greek Poets. London: Duckworth, 1981. A translation and analysis of the Hellenistic biography of Aeschylus, otherwise unavailable in English, can be found in this book, which also includes a bibliography.

Lesky, Albin. Greek Tragedy. Translated by H. A. Frankfort. 3d ed. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979. A scholarly introduction to Aeschylus’s dramaturgy, with a brief summary of his life. A bibliography is included.

Lesky, Albin. A History of Greek Literature. Translated by James Willis and Cornelis de Heer. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996. Aeschylus’s place in the literature of ancient Greece can be traced in this standard history, which includes biographical information and a bibliography.

Podlecki, Anthony J. The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy. 2d ed. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1999. Contains an excellent life of Aeschylus in the first chapter and an interesting appendix on Aeschylus’s description of the Battle of Salamis.

Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. The Art of Aeschylus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Primarily a literary study, this work contains a short but good appendix on the life and times of Aeschylus. There is also an excellent “comparative table of dates and events” and a select bibliography.

Smyth, Herbert Weir. Introduction to Aeschylus: Plays and Fragments with an English Translation. 1922-1926. Reprint. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. Smyth’s biography of Aeschylus, found in the introduction to volume 1, is still excellent despite being published prior to the discovery of the papyrus predating The Suppliants.

Spatz, Lois. Aeschylus. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Written for the general reader, this book includes a biography and an annotated bibliography.