Aeschylus

Only a tiny proportion of the work of the Athenian tragedians is preserved and almost all of this from three poets. The father of Greek tragic drama is Aeschylus (525-456 Bc). Aeschylus was a public figure, who fought for his city at Marathon and possibly at Salamis as well. He seems to have been sympathetic to the coming of democracy. Certainly the city community takes a central place in his work. He is credited with eighty plays, but only six (there is some dispute over a seventh) survive, all from his later years. They include the only surviving play on a contemporary theme, The Persians, and the only complete trilogy, or cycle of three plays, which survives: the Oresteia.

Aeschylus was a man of deep religious sensibility with a strong belief in the underlying harmony of the world. This harmony was decreed and upheld by the gods, who would be offended by anyone who disturbed it. Crimes against harmony included destruction of the natural world, overweening pride (hubris), or breaches in the sacred conventions of warfare. However, what behaviour is actually demanded of men is not always clear. ‘The paths of Zeus’ mind stretch dark and tangled, impervious to sight,’ as the words from one play, The Suppliants, put it. The possibilities of tragedy lie in men unwittingly upsetting the balance.

To make matters more complex Aeschylus allows the gods to actually tempt men into wrongdoing, as Zeus tempts Xerxes, the king of the Persians, into his invasion of Greece. Even more tragically, human beings may be placed by the gods in situations where they are forced to break one convention to uphold another. In Seven against Thebes, Eteocles, king of Thebes, has the sacred duty of protecting his city from attack. But one of the attackers is his brother. He can only fulfil his obligations by committing the crime of fratricide. Whichever path he chooses he is doomed.

It is one of Aeschylus’ achievements as a poet to incorporate a sense of impending gloom into a tragedy from its earliest words. In Agamemnon, the first work of the trilogy Oresteia, the scene is set by a watchman who scours the night sky for the fire signalling that Troy has at last been captured by the Greeks. Something, however, makes him deeply uneasy about what should be a moment of triumph and joy. The audience learns that Agamemnon’s fleet was only able to sail because a sacrifice was made, that of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia. (They would, of course, already have known of the myth and it would be the way that Aeschylus handled the outcome that would be waited for.) There is more anguish waiting for Agamemnon. His wife Clytemnestra is passionately involved with a lover, Aegisthus. She kills Agamemnon on his return. Agamemnon’s crime, the murder of his daughter, is avenged, but Clytemnestra has caused another, the death of a husband, and his blood lies on her hands as she sets herself up with her lover as ruler. This is a common theme in Aeschylus. One transgression gives rise to another. In words from the second play in the trilogy, The Libation Bearers, ‘the blood that mother earth consumes clots hard, it won’t seep through, it breeds revenge’. In The Libation Bearers Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, returning from exile, feels it his duty to avenge his father’s death by murdering his mother and killing Aegisthus. The burden of guilt is passed on. The polluted Orestes then flees to the sacred oracle at Delphi in the hope that he can be purified. He is pursued by the Furies, urged on by the ghost of Clytemnestra.

In the final play, the Eumenides, ‘the Furies’, Aeschylus moves towards resolution. There is a trial in which Apollo appears to support Orestes’ case against the Furies and argue that he was justified. Apollo’s argument turned on the Greek belief that human conception depended entirely on the male sperm, while the womb was merely a receptacle in which it grew into a human being. ‘The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, the new sown seed that grows and swells inside her. The man is the source of life—the one who mounts.’ Thus, to Apollo, Clytemnestra’s crime of killing a man, her husband, and with it all possibilities of future human life, was worse than Orestes’ killing of a mother who had no possibilities.

With a jury equally divided, it is Athena who casts the deciding vote in favour of Orestes for reasons which have been endlessly discussed by critics, but perhaps ultimately so as to uphold good order, moderation, and mercy against the unrestrained anger of the Furies. The city is also extolled by Athena as the truest security for good men. ‘The stronger your fear,’ says Athena, ‘your reverence for the just, the stronger your country’s wall and city’s safety, stronger by far than all men else possess in Scythia’s rugged steppes or Pelops’ level plain,’ and the resolution of the play cannot be separated from the benefits of city government.

Aeschylus’ characters are powerful figures but they are often undeveloped as individuals. It is as if they are used primarily as vehicles for the grandeur of Aeschylus’ words and for stories that move relentlessly forward under their own weight to their tragic or harmonious conclusion. It is the language that is the chief glory of Aeschylus. It is both majestic and emotionally intense, well fitted to the themes of national pride and divine justice that are Aeschylus’ main concerns.