The Life of Aeschylus, which depends on anecdotes collected by Ion of Chios, a contemporary of Sophocles, and the caricatures of the comic poets, contains few reliable facts. It is valuable, however, as a piece of literary criticism, since the stories about the tragic poets usually derived from impressions about their style and from representative verses of their poetry. Aeschylus’ aristocratic origin may be a translation into biographical terms of his striving for ‘‘a grand style’’ and his bestowing ‘‘heroic dignity’’ on his characters (Life 5).
It is the Athens in which Aeschylus grew up, however, that provides the most reliable guide to his tragedies. For Aeschylus belongs to the glorious generation of those who fought at Marathon. Significantly enough, the epitaph preserved in his life commemorates him not as a poet but as a warrior:
Of his noble courage the sacred field of Marathon can tell,
And the long haired Mede, who had good cause to know. (Life 10)
He is also said to have taken part in the battles of Salamis and Plataea, and the legend gave him as brothers Cynegirus, who died heroically at Marathon in the rush to seize the Persian ships (Herodotus 6.114), and Ameinias, who was the best warrior at Salamis (Diodorus 11.27.2). Indeed, war features prominently in all his surviving plays. Persians is a ‘‘Salamis symphony’’ (Adams 1952), displaying the magnitude of a disaster that is first adumbrated by the dream and the omen of the queen mother, then narrated by a messenger who is an eyewitness of the battle, and lastly demonstrated with the arrival on stage of Xerxes in rags. The action of Seven against Thebes coincides with the siege of Thebes, and the chorus envisages the destruction of the city in vivid details that owe much to the sack and burning of the Acropolis by Xerxes’ troops. In Suppliants it is Argos that is under threat, and the play ends with the prospect of war against the Egyptians. The Oresteia is framed by two wars, the Trojan War just won by Agamemnon and the glorious contests to be waged in the future by the Athenians, for it was during the lifetime ofAeschylus that Athens became a major power and the head of a naval league that was soon to be transformed into a tribute-paying empire.
Aeschylus also witnessed the transition from tyranny to radical democracy: he saw the abrupt end of the Pisistratid tyranny, the constitution of Cleisthenes that granted the citizens limited political participation, and the reforms of Ephialtes that stripped the aristocratic council of the Areopagus of almost all its political powers and devolved them to the assembly and the popular Council of Five Hundred. It is no accident that Suppliants is the first text to explicitly refer to ‘‘the ruling hand of the people’’ (demou kratousa cheir, 604; cf. our ‘‘democracy’’), and to portray a city-state where the king behaves like a contemporary Athenian magistrate: he refuses to commit the polis to the support of the suppliants without the approval of the deemos (365-69, 398-401) and subjects his proposal to the vote of the people in the assembly. Eumenides contains various topical allusions to the Argive alliance (28991, 669-73, 762-74) and also alludes to the expedition of 459, when Athenian ships were sent to Egypt to help an Egyptian revolt against Persia (see Debnar, chapter 1 in this volume). It also gives an account of the foundation of the homicide court that is clearly the charter myth for the post-Ephialtean Areopagus. The play thus directly addresses a highly controversial political event.
World History
