A king comes home from ten years at Troy with a captive prophetess, walks on crimson cloth, and is killed in his bath by his wife and her lover (458 BC)
Agamemnon, the first play of the Oresteia; the prophetess is Cassandra.
Literature · Playwrights
Aeschylus
c. 525–456 BC · Greek (Athenian)
Attic tragedy — the earliest of the three great Athenian tragedians
Aeschylus is the earliest Greek tragedian whose plays survive, and is often called the father of tragedy. He is credited with adding a second actor, which made dramatic conflict possible, and with composing connected trilogies on a single story. Six or seven plays survive from perhaps ninety; among them is the only complete tragic trilogy to come down from antiquity. He fought the Persians at Marathon, and his epitaph mentioned that and nothing else.
How to spot them
- ▸The earliest of the three great tragedians, before Sophocles and Euripides
- ▸Added the second actor, reducing the chorus and creating dialogue and conflict
- ▸The only surviving complete Greek trilogy, staged in 458 BC
- ▸Grand, dense, image-laden language and vast supernatural machinery
- ▸Fought at Marathon; died at Gela in Sicily
Key works
A son returns in disguise to his father's tomb, is recognised by a lock of hair and a footprint, and kills his mother (458 BC)
The Libation Bearers (Choephori), the second play of the Oresteia.
Avenging goddesses hound a matricide until the goddess of wisdom convenes the first homicide court on a hill in Athens, and votes to acquit (458 BC)
The Eumenides, the third play of the Oresteia — the founding of the Areopagus.
The oldest surviving play in the world, staged eight years after Salamis and seen entirely from the losers' court at Susa (472 BC)
The Persians — the only surviving Greek tragedy on a historical rather than mythical subject.
Seven champions are matched against seven gates of a besieged city, and the two cursed sons of a Theban king kill each other at the last of them (467 BC)
Seven Against Thebes — the end of his Theban trilogy.
Fifty sisters flee from forced marriage to their fifty cousins and beg asylum from the king of Argos (c. 463 BC)
The Suppliants — long thought his earliest play until a papyrus redated it.
A chained fire-bringer defies the king of the gods on a Caucasian crag and refuses to reveal the prophecy that could save him — a tragedy long ascribed to him, now widely doubted (c. 450 BC)
Prometheus Bound — transmitted under his name, but the authorship is disputed on metrical grounds.
Key ideas
- Justice moving from blood feud to law courts across the arc of a trilogy
- Pathei mathos — learning through suffering, the refrain of the Oresteia's chorus
- Inherited guilt: the curse that runs through a family for generations
- The trilogy as a single connected argument rather than three unrelated plays
Quick-fire facts
- •Born at Eleusis, near Athens, around 525 BC
- •Fought at Marathon in 490 BC, where his brother Cynegirus was killed; probably also at Salamis
- •His epitaph recorded that he fought at Marathon and said nothing about his plays
- •Aristotle credits him with introducing the second actor and reducing the chorus's role
- •Wrote perhaps 70 to 90 plays and won around thirteen first prizes at the City Dionysia
- •Only six or seven plays survive; the Oresteia is the only complete trilogy that has come down to us
- •Died at Gela in Sicily in about 456 BC
- •Legend says he was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a stone
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- World History Encyclopedia — Aeschylus
- Robert Fagles — The Oresteia (introduction)