The usual material of Attic tragedy consists of the complex of heroic myths that represented for the Greeks the stories of their distant past, to be reinterpreted time and time again and made credible for a contemporary audience. Aeschylus is said to have called his plays ‘‘slices from the great banquets of Homer’’ (Athenaeus 347e); ‘‘Homer’’ here refers to the entire corpus of archaic epic narrative, not only to the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Why does Aeschylus prefer the distant past to the recent one? Undoubtedly because it was more glamorous, but also because it allowed the dramatist to address contemporary issues without running the risk of being fined, like the tragic poet Phrynichus, for ‘‘reminding the Athenians of their own woes’’ (Herodotus 6.21.2) when he staged The Capture of Miletus. Last but not least, Aeschylus preferred the past because myth was still a highly flexible medium, as the murder of Agamemnon illustrates. In the Odyssey., Aegisthus both plotted and carried out the murder of Agamemnon, which took place in his own house (4.512-37), whereas in Aeschylus the murder takes place in the house of the Atreids, Aegisthus is only ‘‘the one who plotted death against him but did not dare to do the deed with [his] own hand’’ (Agamemnon 1634-35), and it is Clytemnestra who strikes the actual blow (1384-87).
Persians is an exception: the only extant Attic tragedy (and among the very few we know of) that takes its subject matter from recent history. In this play Aeschylus presented to the Athenians the defeat of their foes at Salamis eight years earlier. But proximity in time is compensated by distance in space: the play takes place at the court of the king of Persia, in Susa. It opens with a triumphant litany of the wealth and majesty of the Persian army by the chorus of Persian elders, followed by the expression of their anxiety for the departed host. The entrance of the queen mother brings more doubts, with her narrative of divine signs (a dream followed by an omen) that portend a defeat. These signs come true when a messenger enters and gives the news of Salamis to the queen and the chorus. Then the ghost of Darius, wearing the full regalia of a Persian king and evoked from his tomb by the queen’s offerings and the dance and song of the chorus, announces the disaster to come at Plataea. In contrast to the messenger and the queen, who attributed Xerxes’ disaster to the cruelty of a fickle god, the ghost accounts for it in light of the moral order upheld by Zeus: For ‘‘Hubris (Arrogance) ripening bears its crop, the wheat-ear of Ate (Infatuation), and reaps a harvest of tears’’ (821-22). The narrative turns into spectacle with the entrance of Xerxes, the first example of a king in rags in extant Greek tragedy, followed by members of the chorus who tear to shreds their magnificent robes.
Given the theme, it is easy to imagine a partisan play gratifying the pride of the victors at the expense of the defeated. Aeschylus does nothing of the kind. It has even been suggested that the play should be read as a warning to the young Athenian democracy and its imperialist policy (Rosenbloom 1995). In Aeschylus’ portrayal the defeat of Xerxes becomes an exemplary reversal that demonstrates the limits set by the gods to human happiness and the danger of infatuation induced by enduring prosperity. Numbers, used at the beginning to evoke Persian manpower and the multitude of their ships, signify the magnitude of the disaster in the wake of Salamis. The vast wealth and luxury that become visible to the audience with the splendid entrance of the queen, ‘‘radiant as the eyes of gods’’ (150-51) and seated in a chariot with her many attendants, has vanished by the time she reenters, unattended and without her chariot. Similes too change their meaning: the young king launched his attack on the Greeks with an army as irresistible as the ocean tide (90), but at Salamis an ocean of disaster breaks on Persia (433, 599-600). The impressive catalogue of the Persian army that opens the play (16-58) is matched first by the catalogue of the eighteen commanders who have perished at Salamis (302-30) and second by the list of all the fighters who did not return with Xerxes (957-1003).
This catastrophe came about because of Xerxes alone - his youth and his ‘‘overproud rashness’’ (831) - since his decision to invade Greece is totally at odds with the policy of his predecessors, as is demonstrated by the long historical excursus of Darius (765-81). Unlike these wise kings, Xerxes violated a natural order guaranteed by the gods by ‘‘devising a means to yoke the strait of Helle, so as to have a passage across’’ (722); he ‘‘yoked to his chariot’’ (190-91) Europe and Asia, which were meant to remain separate, and ‘‘put the yoke of slavery’’ (50) on the Greeks, a people who should be free according to the will of Zeus. But nature turned against him by killing with famine those exceedingly numerous (794) and by setting as a trap a bridge of ice that melted at the first rays of the sun (495-507). He was also guilty of sacrilege, since the Persians ‘‘did not scruple to plunder the images of the gods and to burn their temples’’ (809-10).
World History
