Aeschylus. “The Persians” (472BCE)

Persai (The Persians) (472BCE)

By Aeschylus
Penguin Classics (grouped with Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants and Prometheus Bound), 160pp

Aeschylus is the father of tragedy. Of his estimated 92 plays, only six confirmed works have survived to the present day (with another possible, Prometheus Bound, whose authorship is now uncertain, but once was credited to Aeschylus). Of these six, the earliest is The Persians, a notable play in that it is the only extant Greek tragedy based on contemporary events, though he was not the first to do so.

In 480 BCE the Battle of Salamis ripped through the strait between Piraeus and Salamis Island. The Greek city states and Persia battling over territory came finally to this decisive battle – an event that shaped not only the futures of Greece and Persia, but some historians argue the rest of Western Civilisation as it allowed for the preservation of Athenian democracy. Aeschylus was recalled to military service in 480 BCE became a part of the Greek force at Salamis, and fought the Persians. Eight years later, with memories of this battle still on his mind, he dramatised this now famous conflict in his play, The Persians. It is unique not only for being the only extant Greek tragedy based on contemporary events, but that Aeschylus took the opposing view. The Persians is seen from King Xerxes’s point of view.

The Persians was the second part of a trilogy (the first part had been called Phineus and can be presumed to detail Jason and the Argonauts rescue of King Phineus; the second part was Glaucus, and concerned itself either with a mythical Corinthian king or a Boeotian farmer) and won the first prize at the City Dionysia festival in 472BCE at Athens. The Persians cast Xerxes’s defeat as divine retribution for attempting to build a bridge across the Hellespont, and given Aeschylus’s apparent love of connected trilogies, one can also assume that the two missing plays concern themselves in some fashion with that theme.

The Persians is set in Susa, and a chorus of old men are joined by the Queen Mother Atossa, awaiting news of her son King Xerxes campaign against the Greeks. The chorus tell us of Xerxes’s ambitious plans.

“The army of the king, which makes havoc of cities, by now has passed to the neighbouring land beyond the narrow sea, having crossed the strait of Helle daughter of Athamas on a cable-fastened pontoon-bridge, by casting a riveted causeway as a yoke upon the neck of Ocean.” (P.42-43)

However, the arrival of a messenger, and his detailed and gory description of the Battle of Salamis:

“But since the multitude of our ships was crowded in the narrows, and they could give no assistance the one to the other but [on the contrary] were rammed by the brazen-pointed beaks of their friends, they splintered their whole equipment of oars, the Greek ships, too, all around them noting their opportunity, kept charging them on every side, and the hulls of our vessels began to be capsized nor was the sea any longer visible, so choked was it with wrecks and slaughtered men ; and the shores and the reefs were full of them.” (p.53)

The Persians have been defeated, and Aeschylus, not missing a trick, allows a brief flurry of Greek patriotism, with the now famous cry:

“Sons of the Greeks, advance! Deliver your country, deliver your children and your wives, the temples of your fathers’ gods, the tombs of your ancestors. Now is the contest which decides all!” (p.52 – 3)

At the tomb of her dead husband Darius, Atossa summons his ghost, and Darius condemns the hubris of his son. Before departing Darius foretells of another Persian defeat at the Battle of Plataea (479BCE).

“No, their abiding-place is where Asopus waters the plain with his streams a kindly nourishment for the Boeotians’ land: where the height of disaster is in store for them to suffer as retribution for their pride and impious spirit, in that when they came to Hellas they made no scruple to despoil the statues of the gods, nor to burn temples.” (p.66)

Xerxes’s arrives home, crushed by the defeat, and laments the future of his once great nation, and the failures that are to come. This final section of the play has led some to read it as being sympathetic to the Persians loss, revealing a deeper humanity within Aeschylus, whilst others have read it as a deeper celebration of one Greek victory in a brutal ongoing war. This second reading could bring in claims of xenophobia on Aeschylus’s part – but in a time of conflict, hatred of one’s enemy is natural.

The Persians became an important play, often having revivals in Greek culture, and seventy years after its premiere, it is still being referenced in Greek theatre. It is a play that also became popular in the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire. Aeschylus’s form of tragedy transcended its national boundaries, to become a true work of art. In 1993, Robert Auletta wrote and Peter Sellars directed a new version of The Persians, which articulated the play as a response to the Gulf War of 1990-1991, proving again the versatility of Aeschylus’s work.

The text used for these review purposes was the Bohn’s Classical Library edition, translated by Walter Headlam and C.E.S Headlam, printed in 1909, and downloaded from The Million Books Project.