Aeschylus

Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BC) was a dramatist of classical Athens who wrote in ancient Greek. He is regarded as the first great master of tragedy whose complete works survive, and as the founder of a genre later shaped by Sophocles and Euripides. He matters because much of what we know about tragedy before him has been inferred from reading his plays.

He was born in Eleusis, a small town northwest of Athens known for its mysteries dedicated to Demeter, into a wealthy landowning family. A later tradition says the god Dionysus appeared to him in a dream and urged him to write tragedy, though that story should be treated with caution. His youth coincided with the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny and with the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes. He fought against Persia at Marathon (490 BC), Salamis (480 BC) and Plataea (479 BC). Those experiences shaped The Persians, staged in 472 BC and awarded first prize at the Dionysia, one of the very few surviving Greek tragedies set in recent events.

His theatre is marked by the habit of linking plays into trilogies on a single myth, although each piece could also stand alone. The only complete connected trilogy to survive is the Oresteia, made up of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, which ends with the Furies becoming protectors of the city. He is credited with introducing a second actor, which allowed more dialogue and reduced the role of the chorus. His choruses often have a strong, distinctive personality, and his archaic language builds images that persist throughout a play. Human suffering, and the knowledge that can come from it, is his central theme, along with the inherited weight of family guilt. In The Suppliants there is also an early interest in collective decision-making and the political role of the community.

His life had turbulent moments too. According to Aristotle, he was prosecuted for impiety for revealing secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries on stage, and he was acquitted, largely because of the military service he and his brothers had performed. He travelled to Sicily at the invitation of Hieron of Syracuse, where he produced The Women of Aetna and restaged The Persians. He died in Gela, probably in 456 or 455 BC. Tradition preserves a strange account of his death, in which a tortoise dropped by a bird struck his bald head, but it is a legend without confirmation.

His legacy is considerable. Ancient sources credit him with between seventy and ninety plays, of which seven survive. His epitaph mentions his role at Marathon rather than his career in the theatre. After his death his plays were allowed to be staged again in the competitions, an exceptional honour, and his son Euphorion also became a tragic poet.