Aeschylus was born in Eleusis, a Greek coastal city
not far from Athens that was the center for the
worship of Demeter, goddess of the harvest.His father,
Euphorion, was descended from nobility, but
little else is known about Aeschylus’s family and
early years.
In 499 B.C., Aeschylus began competing in
Athenian dramatic contests,which were popular at
the time. His initial victory was achieved in 484
B.C., and he went on to win first prize in a dozen
more contests during his career. In 490 B.C.,
Aeschylus fought at Marathon against the Persian
Empire in its attempt to conquer Greece, a battle
that claimed his brother, Cynegirus.Aeschylus also
fought the Persians at Salamis, Plataea, and other
battles.Military valor had such a cachet in Aeschylus’s
day that his self-written epitaph, according to
Greek scholar Edith Hamilton, describes his “glorious
courage [on the] hallowed field of Marathon”
but makes no mention of his stunning achievements
as a playwright.
Aeschylus twice visited the court of Hieron of
Syracuse, who was also patron of the poet PINDAR,
in Sicily. Several of Aeschylus’s productions were
performed there. In 476 B.C., Aeschylus composed
a play commemorating the king’s founding of the
new city of Aetna; he died during his second visit.
An official Greek ruling later honored Aeschylus by
providing that the city of Athens would fund the
revival of any of his plays.
Some critics would profess that the art of
tragedy is Aeschylus’s creation. His plays incorporate
genuine dramatic power and tension, startling
and profoundly poetic imagery, and grand, eloquent
language. His subject matter, always lofty,
particularly explores the relationship between humans
and God.Aeschylus was the first tragedian to
supplement the chorus, a group of singers and
dancers who performed the drama, with dialogue
and interaction between individual actors. He was
also the first playwright to enhance the spectacle
with elaborate costumes and stage sets.
Aeschylus penned some 90 plays, of which only
seven remain. His work was powerfully influenced
by the Persian conflict, in which Greece challenged
the ruling world power in order to become a cultural
and political empire in its own right.Accordingly,
The Persians, which won first prize at the
Great Dionysia festival of 472 B.C., dramatizes the
defeat of Athens’s bitter enemy. It is a tribute to
the humanity of the playwright that he portrays
the characters, including Xerxes, king of the Persian
Empire, in a sympathetic light. In The Persians, he
also gives voice to the universal hopes and fears
that characterize life during wartime. The play is
one of the few surviving Greek tragedies based on
contemporary rather than mythological or historical
events.
Seven Against Thebes, part of a trilogy that has
not survived, was awarded first prize in the dramatic
contests in 467 B.C. In it, Eteocles, king of the
ancient Greek city of Thebes, thwarts an attempt
by his brother Polyneices and six warriors to seize
the throne. Both brothers are killed, and order is
restored.
The Suppliant Maidens, written in the 460s B.C.,
is the first play of a lost trilogy in which the 50
daughters of Danaus have escaped from the 50
sons of Egyptus who want to marry them against
their wishes. The maidens have no right to refuse
their suitors under Egyptian law, so they flee to
Argos. There, King Pelasgus, after a democratic
conference with his people, agrees that the State
will provide sanctuary. The play ends with a prayer
and a depiction of the god Zeus as the ultimate
guardian of justice, highlighting the conflict between
human, natural, and divine law.
Aeschylus’s final triumph at the Great Dionysia
took place in 458 B.C. with the Oresteia, a tale of a
familial curse upon an aristocratic household.
Each of the three plays that comprise it—Agamemnon,
The Choephori (also called The Libation Bearers),
and The Eumenides—can be seen as one great
act of a complete drama.
Prometheus Bound, produced after the playwright’s
death, was an early part of a trilogy featuring
the ancient hero Prometheus. Prometheus
was the divine being who stole fire from the gods
to give it to man and was therefore condemned by
Zeus to be shackled to a cliff. In Richmond Lattimore’s
translation, Prometheus laments this error
he made on behalf of humankind: “You see me a
wretched God in chains, the enemy of Zeus, hated
of all the Gods that enter Zeus’s palace hall, because
of my excessive love for Man.” But he is ever
rebellious and defiant, and the play concludes with
an aggravated Zeus plunging Prometheus into the
underworld amid a splendid display of thunder
and lightning.
Critical Analysis
The Oresteia trilogy is today the most-studied of
Aeschylus’s works. Several important historical
events take place before the first play opens.
Aeschylus’s audience was familiar with the legend
of the ancestral curse upon the noble House of
Atreus, which impelled generation after generation
to perform unspeakable acts. King Pelops’s sons
Atreus and Thyestes quarreled over the kingdom
and became enemies; Thyestes seduced and betrayed
Atreus’s wife; and, in retaliation, Atreus fed
Thyestes’ own children to him in a grisly feast. This
was the legacy inherited by Atreus’s sons Menelaus
and Agamemnon, who became king. When
Menelaus’s wife, the beautiful Helen, fled to Troy
with Paris, Agamemnon coordinated an expedition
to retrieve her. Before sailing, Agamemnon
was forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to
appease the gods and cause favorable winds to
blow. The mission to fetch Helen escalated into the
Trojan War. After 10 years of combat, Troy was
captured and the Greeks began to make their way
home. This is where the Oresteia begins.
In Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy, the
king’s wife Clytaemnestra, aggrieved by the sacrifice
of her daughter Iphigenia, takes as her lover
Aegisthus, son of Thyestes. Together they plot to
assassinate Agamemnon upon his return from
Troy, and they succeed. In the second play, The Libation
Bearers, Orestes and Electra, son and daughter
of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, slay their
mother and Aegisthus to avenge their father’s murder.
Orestes states that his was an act of justice, but
when he spies the spirits of retribution known as
the Furies, he knows there is more anguish to come.
In The Eumenides, the third and final play,
Orestes is besieged by the Furies. They are determined
to avenge the crime of matricide whether or
not it was justifiable. Orestes seeks refuge with the
god Apollo, who purifies him of his misdeed, but
the Furies are not appeased. Orestes is then tried
and absolved by a jury in a court set up by the goddess
Athena, but the Furies are enraged that their
authority has been usurped. Lattimore translates
their lamentation:
Gods of the younger generation, you have ridden
down the laws of the elder time, torn them
out of my hands. I, disinherited, suffering,
heavy with anger shall let loose upon the land
the vindictive poison dripping deadly out of
my heart upon the ground.
To mollify the Furies, Athena offers them honorable
positions as tutelary goddesses. “No household
shall be prosperous without your will,” she
promises. “So we shall straighten the lives of all
who worship us.” Thus, the curse on the House of
Atreus is no more.
The Oresteia dramatizes both the conflict between
barbarian ways, represented by the curse
and the Furies, and Hellenism, or the civilization
and culture of ancient Greece that developed and
flourished over Aeschylus’s lifetime. Only Athena,
who represents wisdom and reason as well as the
city of Athens, can persuade the bloodthirsty, ruthless,
and childish Furies to relinquish their ancient
system of punishment in favor of one in which the
law is the instrument of justice.
Aeschylus portrays ordinary men as heroic,
with indomitable spirit, and life itself as a peculiar
combination of suffering and joy, misery, and optimism.
He presents conflicts between and within
individuals that are universal and enduringly relevant.
The Romantic poets Lord Byron, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge all
wrote about Aeschylus’s Prometheus in the 19th
century. The 20th-century playwrights Eugene
O’Neill and T. S. Eliot recast Orestes’ tragedy in
Mourning Becomes Electra and The Family Reunion,
respectively.
“The strange power tragedy has to present suffering
and death in such a way as to exalt and not
depress is to be felt in Aeschylus’s plays as in those
of no other tragic poet,” writes Edith Hamilton in
The Greek Way.“He was the first tragedian; tragedy
was his creation, and he set upon it the stamp of
his own spirit.”
English Versions of Works by Aeschylus
Aeschylus I: Oresteia. Edited by David Grene and
Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983.
Aeschylus II: The Complete Greek Tragedies. Edited by
David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound. Translated by Paul
Roche.Wauconda, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1997.
Orestes Plays of Aeschylus. Translated by Paul Roche.
New York: New American Library, 1962.
Works about Aeschylus
Hamilton, Edith. The Greek Way. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1983.
Herington, John. Aeschylus. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1986.
Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. The Art of Aeschylus. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983.
Spatz, Lois.Aeschylus. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.