Aeschylus :: Father of Tragedy, His Life, Plays and Legacy

Plays / Aeschylus

Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, is the earliest of the three great Athenian tragic poets whose plays survive, and the ancient Greeks themselves treated him as the founder of tragedy as they knew it. Seven plays have come down under his name: Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants, Prometheus Bound, and the three plays of the Oresteia, Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and Eumenides. The Oresteia is the only complete tragic trilogy to have reached us. According to Pausanias, Aeschylus had a high reputation for his poetry and also for his share in the sea-battles at Artemisium and Salamis, yet when he faced death he asked only for his name, his father’s name and his city to be recorded, and for his courage at Marathon to be attested (Pausanias 1.14.5). Plutarch says that he died in Sicily, near Gela (Cimon 8.8).

Aeschylus’ Life and Works

Life

Aeschylus was the son of Euphorion. According to the ancient Life of Aeschylus, which has been handed down with his plays, he was an Athenian of the deme of Eleusis. The Parian Marble, an ancient chronicle inscribed on stone, makes him thirty-five years old at the battle of Marathon, which places his birth in 525/4 BC.

Pausanias preserves Aeschylus’ own account of how he came to write tragedy. When he was a young man, he said, he fell asleep while watching grapes in a field, and Dionysus appeared to him and told him to write tragedy. When day came he made the attempt and found composing quite easy afterwards (Pausanias 1.21.2). Pausanias also says that Aeschylus was the first to represent the Eumenides with snakes in their hair (1.28.6).

His brother Cynegirus, a son of Euphorion, was killed at Marathon, where his hand was cut off by an axe as he seized the figurehead of a ship (Herodotus 6.114). Pausanias says that when Aeschylus was close to death he wrote his name, his father’s and his city’s, and added that the grove at Marathon and the Persians who landed there could bear witness to his courage, and said nothing about his poetry (Pausanias 1.14.5). The same passage credits him with a share in the naval battles at Artemisium and Salamis.

Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, mentions that Aeschylus said he did not know that a certain matter was secret, in a passage about the Mysteries (3.1, 1111a8–10). Clement of Alexandria, writing much later, says that he was tried before the Areopagus for revealing the Mysteries and was acquitted when he showed that he had not been initiated (Stromata 2.14).

Pausanias reports that Aeschylus, like Simonides, travelled to the court of Hieron at Syracuse (Pausanias 1.2.3). According to the Life, he produced a play for the foundation of the city of Aetna by Hieron (the Women of Aetna) and restaged the Persians at Syracuse. His death in Sicily is explained by Plutarch in this way: when the young Sophocles won his first victory in a tragic contest, judged by Cimon and the other generals because the archon Apsephion would not appoint the usual judges by lot, Aeschylus was greatly distressed, stayed only a little longer in Athens and went in anger to Sicily, where he died and is buried near Gela (Plutarch, Cimon 8.7–8).

Ancient writers also tell a story about his death. Because it had been prophesied that he would be killed by something falling on him, they say, he spent his last days out of doors, and an eagle that was carrying a tortoise mistook his bald head for a rock and dropped it on him (Valerius Maximus 9.12 ext. 2; Pliny, Natural History 10.7). Both are writers of the Roman period, and no earlier source tells the story.

Plays

According to the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia drawing on ancient sources, Aeschylus first competed in the 70th Olympiad (499–496 BC), at the age of twenty-five. The Parian Marble dates his first victory to 484 BC, and the ancient Life credits him with thirteen victories.

Plutarch’s account (Cimon 8.7–8) shows that he suffered at least one defeat, by the young Sophocles. The Suda puts the number of his plays at ninety, most of them lost; the surviving seven are the ones listed above.

According to the ancient hypotheses (the introductions printed with the plays), the Persians was produced in the archonship of Menon (472 BC) with Phineus, Glaucus and the satyr play Prometheus; the Seven Against Thebes in the archonship of Theagenides (467 BC) with Laius, Oedipus and the satyr play Sphinx; and the Oresteia in the archonship of Philocles (458 BC) with the satyr play Proteus, all three winning first prize. For Suppliants a papyrus fragment of an ancient production record names the Danaids and the satyr play Amymone in a victory of Aeschylus over Sophocles, but the year is lost.

The seven surviving plays are:

Persians: the Persian court learns of the defeat of Xerxes at Salamis, and the ghost of Darius appears to explain it.
Seven Against Thebes: Eteocles defends Thebes against his brother Polyneices and six other champions, and both brothers die.
Suppliants: the daughters of Danaus flee from Egypt to Argos to escape marriage to their cousins, and King Pelasgus must decide whether to protect them.
Prometheus Bound: Prometheus, chained to a rock for giving fire to mankind, defies Zeus.
Agamemnon: Agamemnon returns from Troy and is murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.
Libation Bearers: Orestes returns to Argos and kills his mother and Aegisthus.
Eumenides: Orestes is pursued by the Furies and tried at Athens, with Athena presiding and Apollo speaking for him.

Pausanias used Aeschylus as a source for myth as well as for his own times. He notes that the poet reduced the champions who marched against Thebes to seven, although there were more chiefs in the expedition, and that the Argives took the number seven from the drama (Pausanias 2.20.5). He also says that the Greeks learned from Aeschylus the Egyptian account that Artemis was the daughter of Demeter and not of Leto (8.37.6), and that Aeschylus got a story about Glaucus of Anthedon from the people of Anthedon and made a play of it (9.22.7).

Legacy

Aeschylus was not the first tragic poet. The ancient hypothesis to the Persians reports, on the authority of Glaucus, a writer on Aeschylus’ plots, that the play was modelled on the Phoenician Women of his older contemporary Phrynichus. But the ancient tradition treats Aeschylus as the great innovator. Aristotle says in the Poetics that Aeschylus first raised the number of actors from one to two, lessened the part of the chorus and gave the spoken part the lead (1449a15–18).

In Aristophanes’ Frogs, Aeschylus is hailed as the first of the Greeks to build towering phrases (Frogs 1004–1005), and the whole play is a contest in the underworld in which Dionysus chooses between Aeschylus and Euripides. Philostratus, writing in the Roman period, says in his Life of Apollonius that the Athenians regarded Aeschylus as the father of tragedy (6.11).

The Life says that after his death the Athenians voted that anyone who wished could produce Aeschylus’ plays in the contest. Later, according to the Lives of the Ten Orators attributed to Plutarch, Lycurgus proposed that the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides be copied and kept in the public archives, to be read out to the actors so that no changes were made (Ps.-Plutarch, Lives of the Ten Orators 841f).

Chronology of Aeschylus’ Life

525/4 – birth (Parian Marble); his deme was Eleusis (ancient Life)
499–496 – first competition (Suda)
490 – battle of Marathon, where his brother Cynegirus was killed (Herodotus 6.114; Pausanias 1.14.5)
484 – first victory (Parian Marble)
480 – naval battles of Artemisium and Salamis (Pausanias 1.14.5)
472 – victory with Phineus, Persians, Glaucus and the satyr play Prometheus (hypothesis to Persians)
468 – defeat by the young Sophocles in the archonship of Apsephion (Plutarch, Cimon 8.7–8)
467 – victory with Laius, Oedipus, Seven Against Thebes and the satyr play Sphinx (hypothesis to Seven Against Thebes)
458 – victory with the Oresteia and the satyr play Proteus (hypothesis to Agamemnon)
456/5 – death in Sicily, near Gela (Plutarch, Cimon 8.8; the year from the Parian Marble)

Aeschylus Sources

Herodotus 6.114 (Perseus) for Cynegirus at Marathon; Pausanias 1.2.3, 1.14.5, 1.21.2 and 1.28.6 for Aeschylus’ journey to Hieron, his epitaph, his vision of Dionysus and the snakes of the Eumenides; Plutarch, Cimon 8.7–8 for his defeat by Sophocles and his death at Gela; Pausanias 2.20.5, 8.37.6 and 9.22.7 for his treatment of myth; Aristotle, Poetics 1449a15–18 and Nicomachean Ethics 3.1; Aristophanes, Frogs 1004–1005; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 2.14; Valerius Maximus 9.12 ext. 2 and Pliny, Natural History 10.7 for the story of his death; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 6.11; Ps.-Plutarch, Lives of the Ten Orators 841f; the ancient Life of Aeschylus, the hypotheses to his plays, the Parian Marble and the Suda.