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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bromberg, Jacques A., 1978- editor. Burian, Peter, 1943- editor.
Title: A companion to Aeschylus edited by Jacques A. Bromberg, Peter Burian.
Description: Hoboken, NJ John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Fig. 21.1 Hades takes Persephone off to the underworld. (After Tillyard 1923, pl.33; cf. Jenkins 1983, pl. 18).
Fig. 31.1 Facsimile image from the Medicean manuscript of Aeschylus (Rostagno 1896, pl. 18). The text of Agamemnon breaks off at the bottom of the left page, after v.1159; the text of Libation Bearers starts in, without any sign of a change of play, at the top of the right page. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
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Preface and Acknowledgements
This volume arrives at a moment when renewed interest in ancient Greek drama is evident in the number of translations, adaptations, and performances appearing around the world across multiple media. Aeschylus may not be as familiar to many readers as Sophocles and Euripides, but we have striven to attract and accommodate a broad audience by providing English translations of all Greek, consistently spelling out names of journals and reference works, and in general keeping abbreviations to a minimum. Even in the few chapters that deal with technical issues such as metre and textual transmission, we have made every effort to explain unfamiliar terms and avoid disciplinary jargon. Each chapter contains suggestions for further reading as well as bibliographical information on all works cited. We hope students reading Aeschylus in high school or college classes, professional scholars, and everyone in between, will find useful guidance within these pages.
We owe much to many who have fostered this project. We offer thanks first to the helpful staff at Wiley-Blackwell: Haze Humbert, the acquisitions editor who commissioned this volume, a long succession of project managers, most recently Andrew Minton, and of editorial assistants. All these people were consistently encouraging and amazingly patient over the long gestation of the book. Our copy editor, Katherine Carr, did a thoughtful and meticulous job. And of course, we thank our contributors, some of whom have waited a long time to see their work on this project in print, others of whom produced splendid contributions on very short notice. We are delighted by the mix of more established and younger scholars, as well as the range of methodologies, viewpoints, and expertises represented by their contributions.
Notes on Contributors
Emily Baragwanath is Associate Professor in the Classics Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her publications include Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus (Oxford, 2008), articles on the literary techniques employed by the Greek historians, and the co-edited volumes Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus (Oxford, 2012) and Clio and Thalia: Attic Comedy and Historiography (Histos Supplement 2017). At present she is completing a monograph on Xenophon’s representation of women.
Malcolm Bell III is Professor Emeritus of classical archaeology at the University of Virginia and has long been co-director of the American excavations at the ancient Sicilian city of Morgantina. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton University and has served as professor-in-charge at the American Academy in Rome. He has written extensively on the art, archaeology, and political economy of Greek Sicily, and on works of Greek sculpture found in Rome. The relevance of Pindar, Theocritus and other Greek poets to sculpture and painting has been a recurrent theme in his writing. Bell’s study of the city plan and civic architecture of Morgantina will appear as volume seven in the series Morgantina Studies
Jacques A. Bromberg holds degrees in Classics and Classical Studies from Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught at Colby College and Duke University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Pittsburgh, and affiliate of the Global Studies Center and the Center for Bioethics and Health Law. He has published research on ancient academic disciplines, the Socratic tradition in Greek drama, receptions of Aeschylus in Latin America and the history and philosophy of sport. He is author of Global Classics (Routledge, 2021), and founding editor and editor-inchief of the open-access journal, Global Antiquities
Peter Burian is Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Duke University, where he served as Professor of Classical and Comparative Literature, Professor of Theater Studies, and Dean of the Humanities. His research interests centre on Greek theatre and classical reception. His publications include numerous essays on the surviving Greek tragedians, an Aris and Phillips edition of Euripides’ Helen and a Bryn Mawr commentary on Aristophanes’ Birds. He has edited a number of volumes, including the complete Greek Tragedy in New Translations (Oxford University Press). He is also active as a translator from Greek (including plays by Aeschylus and Euripides) and Italian. He was twice professor-in-charge
at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome and was awarded Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. His current projects include a study of theatre of the fifth century as a participant in the Athenian democracy and an adaptation of Birds.
Sarah Derbew received her PhD in Classics from Yale University and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Classics at Stanford University, where she is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research focuses on literary and artistic representations of black people in ancient Greece. Her interests extend to the twenty-first century; she has written about GrecoRoman antiquity in the African diaspora. She recently completed on her book, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, in which she employs critical race theory to map out an expansive archaeology of blackness in ancient Greek literature and art.
A. C. Duncan is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. His research focuses on fifth-century Athenian drama and its aesthetic and political receptions across time and culture. In recent and forthcoming publications, including a monograph on theatrical ugliness, he pays special attention to the affective, material and cognitive dimensions of ancient drama. He has written on the offstage life of masks and the ways theatregoers’ intersubjective presence shapes the experience and meaning of drama. A theatremaker himself, he has over 15 years’ experience directing, translating and producing ancient plays for the stage. He makes a joyful habit of engaging with modern performance, and looks forward to future work on the politics of producing Greek tragedy in postcolonial contexts.
P. J. Finglass is Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol, UK. Having recently completed terms as Director of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership and as Head of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Bristol, he now holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship whose goal is a new edition with commentary of Sappho and Alcaeus. He has published a monograph Sophocles (2019) in the series “Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics”, as well as editions of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (2018), Ajax (2011), and Electra (2007), of Stesichorus (2014), and of Pindar’s Pythian Eleven (2007) in the series “Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries”. He has co-edited several volumes, including (with Adrian Kelly) The Cambridge Companion to Sappho (2021) and Stesichorus in Context (2015) and (with Lyndsay Coo) Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy (2020). He also edits the journal Classical Quarterly.
Helene P. Foley is Claire Tow Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of books and articles on Greek epic and drama, on women and gender in antiquity, and on modern performance and adaptation of Greek drama. Author of Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy, Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, and Euripides: Hecuba and co-author of Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, she edited Reflections of Women in Antiquity and co-edited Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, and Aristophanes and Politics.
A. F. Garvie is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow. His principal interest has been Homer and Greek Tragedy. His full-scale commentaries on Aeschylus Choephori (Oxford
University Press, 1986) and Aeschylus Persae (Oxford University Press, 2009) are for advanced readers, while The Plays of Aeschylus (2nd ed. Bloomsbury, 2016) and The Plays of Sophocles (2nd ed. Bloomsbury, 2016) are more suitable for the non-specialist. He has given lectures in many universities in Europe, particularly in Italy, and in addition to producing commentaries on Homer and Sophocles, he has made many contributions to classical journals and other publications on various aspects of Greek tragedy. For a year he was the Visiting Gillespie Professor at the College of Wooster, Ohio, and he also taught for a summer semester at the Ohio State University, and briefly at the University of Guelph, Ontario. For six years he was co-editor of Classical Review. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Mark Griffith was Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Literature at University of California, Berkeley until his retirement in 2020, and also held an appointment in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. He is the author of monographs The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound (1977), Aristophanes’ Frogs (2013), and Greek Satyr Play: Five Studies (2015), and has edited the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’ Antigone for the Cambridge “Green and Yellow” series. With Glenn Most he co-edited the revised set of translations of The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago University Press, 2013). He has written articles on Greek tragedy and satyr-play, Vergil, Hesiod, Greek lyric, mules, early Greek education, music and performance, and is currently completing an ethnomusicological book on Music and Difference in Ancient Greece
Rebecca Futo Kennedy, PhD, is Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Environmental Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Denison University (Granville, Ohio). Her areas of research include Athenian tragedy and political, social, legal and economic history as well as race, ethnicity and immigration in the ancient Mediterranean. She is author of Athena’s Justice (Lang, 2009) and Immigrant Women in Athens (Routledge, 2014) and is editor of Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus (2018). She co-edited The Routledge Handbook to Identity and the Environment (2015) with Molly Jones-Lewis and co-edited and translated Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Hackett, 2013) with C. Sydnor Roy and Max Goldman.
Adam Lecznar has taught in Classics departments across the UK, including at University College London, Bristol, Leeds and Royal Holloway. His research interests mainly concern classical reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in particular the way that the category of the ancient past and the notion of classicism have provided inspiration for modern literature and philosophy. Lecznar has recently published his first monograph Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and a co-edited essay collection on Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (Oxford University Press, 2020), alongside various essays on reception, postcolonialism and Greek literature. He is now beginning work on his second monograph on the hybrid classicism of the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka.
Vayos Liapis is Professor of Ancient Theatre and Its Reception at the Open University of Cyprus. He has previously been faculty at Universities in Cyprus, Montreal and Patras, Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is the author of A Commentary on the Rhesus Attributed to Euripides (Oxford, 2012) and co-editor of Greek Tragedy after the Fifth Century (Cambridge, 2018) and Adapting Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 2020). He is the recipient of the 2018 National Prize for the Translation of Ancient Greek Literature into Modern Greek (Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports).
C. W. Marshall is Professor of Greek at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy (2006), The Structure and Stagecraft of Euripides’ Helen (2014), Aeschylus: Libation Bearers (2017) and Aristophanes: Frogs (2020). His research focuses on ancient performance techniques and how they contribute to the interpretation of drama, and on the reception of classical literature in antiquity and modern times, with a particular emphasis on comics and television.
Hallie Rebecca Marshall is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on ancient Greek drama in performance and its reception in later periods. She has published on the plays of Aristophanes, Sarah Kane, Ted Hughes, Marie Clements, Deanne Kasokeo and Tony Harrison, and is co-editor of Greek Drama V: Studies in the Theatre of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BCE (Bloomsbury, 2020). She is currently working on a monograph on the classical plays of British poet Tony Harrison.
Marsh McCall holds degrees in Classics and Classical Philology from Harvard, and has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and, since 1976, Stanford. He held a Junior Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies in 1968–69, an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship at the Institute for Classical Studies, London in 1973–74, and an ACLS Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center in 1984–85. He has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Melbourne University in 1980, a Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College Oxford in 1992–93, a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College Oxford in 1999–2000, and a Visiting Researcher at St Anne’s College Oxford in 2005 and 2008. His work has centred in Ancient Rhetoric and, especially, Greek Tragedy. A series of articles established the manuscript sources of the earliest printed editions – including the Aldine editio princeps – of Aeschylus, specifically for the Suppliant Women
Peter Meineck holds the endowed chair of Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University. He is also the founder of Aquila Theatre. Publications include Theatrocracy: Greek Drama, Cognition and the Imperative for Theatre (Routledge, 2018), The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory (Routledge, 2019), Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Hackett, 2014) and Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks (with David Konstan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He has translated, published, directed and produced several Aeschylus plays and used Aeschylean texts in public programmes with veterans, marginalised teens, refugees and people gathered at public libraries, arts facilities, community centres and museums. He is currently working on a biography of Aeschylus and his relationship to democracy.
Robin Mitchell-Boyask is Professor of Greek and Roman Classics at Temple University. He has also been a Junior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington DC, and a Fellow of Wolfson College and the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University. In addition to a number of articles on Greek tragedy and Vergilian epic, he has written two monographs –Plague and The Athenian Imagination: Drama, History and the Cult of Asclepius (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Aeschylus Eumenides (Duckworth, 2009) – and edited Approaches to Teaching the Dramas of Euripides (MLA, 2002). He currently edits the journal Classical World and is working on a commentary on Euripides’ Bacchae
F. S. Naiden studies ancient Greek law, religion and warfare, including Near-Eastern parallels, especially among the Western Semites. Chief periods of interest are the Classical and Hellenistic. Recently completed is a study of Alexander the Great, his officers and the role of religion in Macedonian conquests, Soldier, Priest, and God, combining his interests in war-
fare, religion and the Near East. Now underway is a study of war councils and command and control throughout antiquity and into the early modern period.
Sarah Nooter is a Professor of Classics and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge, 2012) and The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge, 2017), as well as many articles on Greek tragedy, classical reception in Africa, poetry and sound studies. She also co-edited Sound and the Ancient Senses (Routledge, 2019) with Shane Butler, and is the editor-in-chief of the journal Classical Philology . She is now finishing a book which explores modes of embodiment and temporality in ancient Greek poetry and song.
Kirk Ormand is the Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics at Oberlin College, where he has taught since 2001. He is the author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (1999), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece (2014), and Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (2nd ed., 2018); he has edited A Companion to Sophocles (2012) and co-edited with Ruby Blondell Ancient Sex: New Essays (2015). He has published articles on Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Hipponax, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Lucan, Heliodorus, Michel Foucault and Clint Eastwood.
Arum Park is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Arizona. Her publications include articles and book chapters on archaic and classical Greek poetry, the Greek novel, and Augustan poetry, as well as public-facing pieces on #metoo in Greco-Roman literature, race and diversity in Classics, and classical reception. She is the editor of Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought: Essays in Honor of Peter M. Smith (Routledge, 2017) and the author of Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press).
Anthony Podlecki holds degrees from Holy Cross College, Worcester MA, Oxford and University of Toronto. He taught at Northwestern, Penn State and University of British Columbia. He specialised in the history and literature of archaic and classical Greece, and the interrelations between these two areas. His publications include studies of Homer, Greek lyric, drama and the fifth-century political figures Themistocles and Pericles.
David H. Porter (1935–2016) excelled in at least three careers, as a scholar, academic administrator, and musician. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he received a PhD in classics from Princeton. He taught from 1962 to 1987 (classics, music and liberal arts) at Carleton College, serving as its interim president during his final year there. He then served as president of Skidmore College from 1987 to 1999, returning after visiting appointments at Williams College and Indiana University to resume teaching until his retirement in 2013. Porter had broad scholarly interests, publishing books on Greek tragedy, Horace, Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and Willa Cather, as well as numerous articles on literary subjects and liberal arts education. He was also a distinguished pianist, having studied with Eduard Steuermann, whose writings he later edited. Porter performed frequently on campus and gave recitals around the US and in the UK.
Deborah H. Roberts is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Haverford College, Pennsylvania. She works primarily on Greek tragedy, classical reception and translation studies, and is the author of Apollo and his Oracle in the Oresteia (Göttingen, 1984), co-editor (with Francis Dunn and Don Fowler) of Reading the
End: Closure in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton, 1997), and co-author (with Sheila Murnaghan) of Childhood and the Classics: Britain and America, 1850–1965 (Oxford, 2018). Her translations of Greek tragedy include Euripides’ Ion (Penn Greek Drama series, Philadelphia 1999), Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (Indianapolis 2012), and Euripides’ Andromache (Chicago series, revised edition, Chicago 2013); she is currently working on a translation of Aeschylus’s Persians.
David Rosenbloom is Professor and Chair of the Ancient Studies Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has published a book on Aeschylus’s Persians and co-edited Greek Drama IV, a volume of essays on tragedy, comedy, satyr-play and theatrical culture. He has published extensively on Attic tragedy and comedy as well as on Athenian history and oratory. He was a Junior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies and has held visiting positions at Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities.
Sydnor Roy is Assistant Professor of Classics in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literature at Texas Tech University. She is the co-author of Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World (Hackett, 2013, with R. Kennedy and M. Goldman). Her primary research focus is political history and theory in the ancient Mediterranean, with a special focus on Greek interactions with Persia, Phoenicia and Egypt. She is currently working on a monograph on political thought in Herodotus’s Histories.
I. A. Ruffell is Professor of Greek Drama and Culture at the University of Glasgow. Her publications include monographs on Greek comedy (Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy: The Art of the Impossible, Oxford, 2011) and tragedy (Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound, London, 2012). She has translated Aeschylus and Euripides for professional theatre productions. As well as drama, she has also published on Roman satire and on ancient technology.
R. B. Rutherford is Tutor in Greek and Latin Literature at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He has taught and lectured on Greek tragedy for many years. Among his publications are Greek Tragic Style (2012) and commentaries on Homer, Iliad 18 (2019) and Odyssey 19 and 20 (1992).
Richard Seaford is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter. He is the author of numerous books and articles on ancient Greek drama, poetry, religion, economic history and philosophy. In 2009 he was Honorary President of the UK Classical Association. His recent books include Cosmology and the Polis. The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (2012), Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece: Selected Essays, edited by Robert Bostock (2018), and The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India: A Historical Comparison (2020), all published by Cambridge.
Carl Shaw teaches all levels of ancient Greek language and literature at New College, the honors college of Florida. His scholarly interests lie broadly in the areas of Greek literature and culture, with a particular focus on drama. He is the author of Satyric Play: The Evolution of Greek Comedy and Satyr Drama (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Euripides: Cyclops (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).
Amit Shilo is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His forthcoming book is Beyond Death in the Oresteia: Poetics, Ethics, and Politics. He is a co-founder of Classics and Social Justice. His current research is on polytheism and Athenian democratic thought.
Alan H. Sommerstein is Emeritus Professor of Greek in the University of Nottingham. Among much else, he has edited and translated the plays and fragments of Aeschylus for the Loeb Classical Library (2008) and published Aeschylean Tragedy (2nd ed. 2010) and editions with commentary of Eumenides (1989) and Suppliants (2019).
Eva Stehle is Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park and author of Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1997) as well as numerous articles on Greek poetry and performance, with a special focus on women. She is completing a book on Sappho and at work on a book about performance of communal rituals, especially women’s rituals in classical Greece.
Isabelle Torrance is Professor of Classical Reception at Aarhus University, Denmark. A Classicist by training, she has published extensively on Greek tragedy and its reception. Her books include Aeschylus: Seven against Thebes (London, 2007), Metapoetry in Euripides (Oxford, 2013), Aeschylus and War: Comparative Perspectives on Seven against Thebes (London, 2017), Euripides (London, 2019), Euripides: Iphigenia among the Taurians (London, 2019), and Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016 (Oxford, 2020; with D. O’Rourke). From 2019 she has been Principal Investigator on the project “Classical Influences and Irish Culture” funded by the European Research Council, a post she will hold until 2024.
Robert W. Wallace is Professor of Classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of some 95 articles on Greek literature, history, intellectual history, law, numismatics and music theory. His books include The Areopagos Council, to 307 BC (1989) and Reconstructing Damon: Music, Wisdom Teaching, and Politics in Perikles’ Athens (2015). In addition, he coauthored Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece (2007) and Aristotle Constitution of the Athenians (2015), and co-edited Harmonia Mundi: Musica e filosofia nel’antichità, Poet, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece, Transitions to Empire 360–146 BC, and Symposion 2001 on Greek law. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Pisa, Siena, Trent, Urbino and Syracuse, and has lectured widely in the US and Europe.
Naomi Weiss is Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. She is the author of The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater (University of California Press, 2018) and Seeing Theater: The Phenomenologies of Classical Greek Drama (University of California Press, 2023). She co-edited both Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (Brill, 2019) and Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is beginning work on two projects: a commentary on Euripides’ Orestes (with Sarah Olsen) and a monograph on the interaction between tragic and novel form in 21st-century fiction.
Theodore Ziolkowski is Class of 1900 Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He has published 35 books, mainly on German Romanticism and on the reception of classical antiquity in modern literature, including several chapters on Prometheus.
Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History
Peter Burian
This volume, written by a team of scholars that includes some of the most prominent senior Aeschyleans alongside extraordinarily accomplished younger scholars, is intended to explore, in so far as a single book can, every aspect of Aeschylus’s art, including the historical, intellectual and cultural milieu from which his work emerged (Part I); chapters on the plays themselves, along with consideration of fragmentary works as well as literary and dramatic perspectives (Part II); Aeschylean drama in its larger social, political and religious contexts (Part III); and a broad range of topics in the reception of Aeschylus from antiquity to the present day (Part IV).It is the first such comprehensive, multi-authored work in English dedicated to the first surviving Greek tragedian. Jacques Bromberg synthesises the contents of the volume in his Epilogue, whereas this Introduction is meant simply to set the scene. It examines the sources of our information about the man himself and his career in order to suggest what we can know and reasonably surmise about his life, and offers an initial assessment of his significance, above all the significance of his contributions to the history of drama.
Aeschylus comes onto the scene, not at the very beginning of the Athenian tragic theatre but close enough to it to be regarded as the essential founding figure. The surviving corpus of his work consists of six complete plays – less than 10% of his production and all dating from the last two decades of his long career –and Prometheus Bound, which is likely not his. In addition, there are somewhat fewer than five hundred fragments longer than a single word or isolated phrase. The enormous admiration and popularity which he enjoyed in his lifetime and through the fifth century bce yielded later to the consensus that Sophocles was the more perfect artist and Euripides the more exciting and intellectually challenging playwright, but Aeschylus’s role in the development of tragedy was never forgotten. Here, for example, is the image of Aeschylus brought to mind in, of all places, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a novelistic account of the supposed miracles and travels of a first-century ce sage written by Philostratus in the early third century. Apollonius is relating his reaction to an encounter with a group of Indian philosophers:
When I met them, I experienced something regarding the men’s message akin to what the Athenians are said to have experienced when confronted with the ingenuity of Aeschylus. For he was a tragic poet, and saw the art unformed and, as yet, lacking sophistication. If he had simply shortened the choruses, which were too long, or invented the actors’ dialogues, rejecting long solos, or contrived offstage deaths, so that murder was not committed before the audience’s eyes, this would not be lacking in ingenuity, but might seem such as to have provided opportunities for inventiveness even to someone else who was less skilled in poetry. But he, reflecting that he was worthy of composing tragic poetry, and further, that tragedy as an art form was suited to the sublime rather than the humble and commonplace, adopted masks and other stage properties that captured the appearance of the heroes and mounted the actors on high boots so that they would have an heroic gait, and he was the first to adorn them with costumes fitting for heroes and heroines to wear. As a result of which, the Athenians considered him the father of tragedy, and summoned him even after death to the Dionysiac festivals. For, following a public vote, Aeschylus’s plays were given repeat performances, and he won anew.
This Greek writer of the Roman imperial period, at any rate, whose generation was apparently the last to have access to many tragedies soon to be lost, except in anthologised excerpts (see Robert Garland (2004, 70 and 234)) considered Aeschylus worthy of being called the father of tragedy for the excellence of both his poetry and his innovative stagecraft. His list of Aeschylus’s accomplishments is not unique, however; on the contrary we find versions of it in almost every ancient source examined in what follows.
The Life of Aeschylus
What we can say with any certainty about Aeschylus’s life is severely limited and does not permit us to construct anything like a full biography, but evidence gleaned from a number of disparate sources offers at least a plausible outline. The most substantial primary source of information about Aeschylus’s life is a short Greek Life, usually known as the Vita Aeschyli, an undated compendium based on earlier materials. Mary Lefkowitz (1981), examining a whole series of such literary biographies, concludes that they are mostly fictional, made up of gleanings from the poets’ works applied to their authors and fleshed out with anecdotes of varying provenance and credibility. Lefkowitz’s insistence on more or less complete fictionality has met with resistance (e.g. Kivilo 2010) and most critics today are willing to see in these lives a mixture of fact and fiction allowing room to exercise judgement.
Even Lefkowitz does not deny that there are entirely plausible elements within the Life: she sees no reason, for example, to doubt the claim that Aeschylus took part in the battle of Marathon alongside his brother Cynaegirus, whose death in that battle is recorded by Herodotus, 6.114, and fought also at Salamis and Platea, The tradition that stipulates that Aeschylus saw action at the three greatest Greek victories of the Persian Wars need not be fictional: most Athenian men neither too young nor too old to fight must have participated in these crucial encounters. But, as we shall see, Aeschylus’s reputation as a military man will become an important part of the way he and his dramas are characterised.
One must nevertheless consider the ways the portrait in the Life has likely been “touched up”. Where, for example, the Life states as a simple fact that Aeschylus’s family belonged to the aristocracy, Suzanne Saïd (2005), 217 suggests that this “may be a translation into biographical terms of his striving for a ‘grand style’”. And the fact that his family was from Eleusis may well have given rise to the story that he was prosecuted for revealing secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries in his plays and acquitted of the crime. Lefkowitz rejects this story on the ground that its source, the fourth-century polymath Heraclides Ponticus, is unreliable,
Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History 3
suggesting that Heraclides may have drawn his anecdote from a scene in comedy. We have, however, an offhand reference in the less capricious Aristotle, who cites Aeschylus’s explanation of his revelation of secrets as an example of people who did not know what they were doing: “they were not aware that the matter was a secret, as Aeschylus said of the Mysteries” (Nicomachean Ethics 3.111a). The casualness of the remark suggests that there was a wellknown incident in which Aeschylus answered the charge that he had profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries in one of his dramas, but this does not show that Aeschylus was formally tried and acquitted in court. Heraclides’ story might simply be the embellishment of a complaint made by someone who objected to Aeschylus’s employment of ritual words or acts meant to be kept from the uninitiated.
The story of Aeschylus’s death is the most bizarre of the various anecdotes told in our sources. As the Life recounts it,
an eagle had seized a tortoise, but as it was not strong enough to break open its prey, dropped it on the rocks to crush its shell. But the tortoise fell on the poet’s head and killed him. He had in fact received this oracle: “a weapon thrown from the heavens will kill you”.
The first-century ce Roman authors Pliny the Elder and Valerius Maximus offer variant versions that attempt in different ways to make the story more plausible. Pliny, the encyclopedic natural historian, describing a particular kind of eagle he calls “morphnos”, recasts the oracle in a way that makes Aeschylus’s strange demise the result of a sensible but utterly mistaken response to prophecy – the typical tale of an oracle misunderstood:
This eagle has the instinct to break the shell of the tortoise by letting it fall from aloft, a circumstance which caused the death of the poet Aeschylus. An oracle, it is said, had predicted his death on that day by the fall of a house, upon which he took the precaution of trusting himself only under the canopy of the heavens. (Historia naturalis 10. 1. 3)
Valerius, on the other hand, does not even mention the oracle, but adds the detail that Aeschylus was bald and so the eagle mistook the top of his head for a rock:
Aeschylus did not meet a willing death, but it is worth mentioning because of its novelty. As he was leaving the walls where he was staying in Italy, he stopped in a sunny spot. An eagle who was flying above him carrying a tortoise was tricked by his shining skull – for he had no hair – and it dropped it on him as if he were a stone so that it might eat the flesh from the broken shell. (Facta et Dicta Memorabilia 9.12)
These Roman takes on the story nicely represent its very divergent possibilities. Valerius’s version is almost comic in tone: a funny thing happened on the way to the seashore. Aeschylus is the victim of chance misfortune, tyche – admittedly a bizarre one. His only fault is sitting in the sun with his bald pate on full view. Ironically, in a kind of parody of tragic ignorance, the mistaken identity in this tragedy is the eagle’s confusion of that pate for a rock. Pliny, on the other hand, puts the poet’s error at the centre of the tale. Like Oedipus, he runs in the wrong direction because he thinks he knows what he must avoid, and instead goes straight into it.
How might such a tale come into being in the first place? There is of course no certain answer, but given the difference in its tellings, one might think that more than one impulse shaped it from the beginning. Aeschylus himself may have unwittingly had a hand. A fragment of Aeschylus’s Psychagogoi, a play that took as its subject the Odyssean Nekyia (Book 11), has Tiresias foretell that a heron will drop its dung from on high, containing the barbs
of a sea creature that will rot Odysseus’s “old and hairless skin” [i.e. scalp], frag. 274. This is at least as bizarre as Aeschylus’s fate and it already contains the elements of something lethal dropped from the sky onto a bald head, as well as potentially comic oddity. Then of course, entirely devoid of such elements, there are the eagles in the great simile of Agamemnon 109–20 that swoop down to devour a pregnant hare and her offspring still in the womb.
Lefkowitz, commenting on the version in the Life, observes that death as the fulfilment of prophecy misunderstood or ignored aligns Aeschylus with other great poets, like Homer and Hesiod, whose deaths were also foretold but also brought to pass in unexpected ways. The missile is guided by destiny: aimed at the rocks but hits the poet, elevating him to the status of hero, as evidenced in the Life by the description of sacrifices and other honours he received at his tomb. But Lefkowitz acknowledges as well that the account in the Life “both marks Aeschylus as extraordinary and at the same time demeans him”. We are left with a series of ironies, not the least of which is that the instrument of Aeschylus’s destruction was the tortoise, whose shell is used to make the poet’s lyre.
A paradigmatic case of embellishment arises from the various explanations of reports that Aeschylus left Athens for Sicily, apparently on at least two occasions, and died while there. The simple explanation that he received repeated invitations from the Sicilian ruler Hieron I to put on dramas there is given in the Life but apparently not perceived as sufficient. There are three different explanations offered, all of them involving negative feelings in Athens and making his journeys seem like self-chosen exile. The first two relate his departure to rejections in favour of other poets: according to some, Aeschylus went to stay with Hieron after being criticised and losing the dramatic competition to Sophocles, when the latter was still young; others say it was because Simonides bested him in a contest for an elegy to commemorate the fallen at Marathon.
The third is of a different order, involving the performance of Eumenides, the third tragedy of the Oresteia. The entrance of the Chorus of Furies in that play is said to have so frightened the audience that children fainted and pregnant women miscarried. Apart from the interest of the assumption that young children and pregnant women were in the audience (for confirmation of this possibility, see the evidence cited in Pickard-Cambridge 1968, 263–65), this anecdote seems to be stitched together, as Lefkowitz points out, from a series of lines in the play in which the Furies threaten to destroy the seed (187–88), households (354) and childbearing (785) of the land.
Yet a fourth reason for the supposed flight to Sicily is provided by another important source of information about Aeschylus, a brief entry in the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine lexiconencyclopedia whose remarks on literary history are of particular value when quoting or paraphrasing scholia (annotations) to ancient texts, many of them now lost, or providing dates that derive from official records. On the subject of Aeschylus’s travel to Sicily, the Suda offers a version different from those in the Life, but which nevertheless, like them, implies strong Athenian disfavour for the poet and consequent self-imposed exile. In this version Aeschylus fled after the stage (or wooden seating: the word ἴκρια is so used by Aristophanes and the comic poet Cratinus) of the Theatre of Dionysus collapsed during a performance of one of his plays.
Why these negative explanations for what might well have been considered a sign of international recognition for the Athenian poet? After all, the lyric poets Simonides from Ceos and Pindar from Thebes were known to have been similarly honoured by Hieron. The seeming need to find failures or mishaps to account for Aeschylus’s Sicilian sojourns might suggest some embarrassment at his departure from Athens. The fact that the most important contemporary poet of the democratic polis went to serve in the court of a tyrant may perhaps have raised Athenian hackles, but none of the ancient sources suggest this. It seems more likely, given the account of Hieron’s lavish patronage and the honours bestowed upon the
poet in Sicily, both before and after his death, that the stories of Aeschylus’s flight imply a feeling that the poet had not been given his due by the Athenians during his lifetime.
Recompense is accomplished with posthumous honours. After describing the rich burial given Aeschylus by the people of Gela, the sacrifices and dramatic recitations offered at his hero’s tomb, the Life points out that, the Athenians too gave him a singular honour after his death, awarding a chorus (i.e. authorising a performance at the Dionysia) or, in a variant reading, a golden crown to anyone who wished to put on one of his plays. It also mentions that his plays won “not a few” posthumous victories at the Dionysia, implying that Aeschylean tetralogies were put into competition with new ones.
From what we know of Aeschylus’s success in his home city, the stories of failures and disparagement in our sources are not easy to explain. Indeed, to judge from the number of victories attributed to him in the Life and the Suda, Aeschylus seems to have been enormously popular. Both give the number of victories he won as 13 (and without other qualification we can assume that the figure refers to first prizes awarded at the Great Dionysia). This means that 52 of Aeschylus’s plays, out of a total number that seems to have been more than 70 and perhaps as many as 90, were victorious and the first of these came only after he had been presenting dramas at the Dionysia for about 15 years. Assuming that he competed roughly every two years (as suggested by Wiles 2000, 172), that would give him a record of 13 wins in roughly 20 outings. Whatever the exact numbers, it is clear that Aeschylus was by far the most successful dramatist of his day.
The number of victories is likely to be derived from official records and thus reliable, but two additional elements in the sources make the story a bit more complicated. The first is that the Suda and the Life are not in complete agreement about the numbers:
Suda: He wrote (ἔγραψε) elegies and ninety tragedies. He won twenty-eight victories. Some say it was thirteen.
Life: He lived for sixty-three years, during which he composed (or put on, ἐποίησεv) seventy dramas and additionally around five [?] satyr plays.
The Suda clearly provides information about the number of victories from two different sources. Twenty-eight victories, if meant to indicate victories at the Great Dionysia, seems an improbably high number, but the figure might include victories in Rural Dionysia or even prize-winning performances elsewhere in the Greek world. The difference in the total number of plays by Aeschylus reflects an uncertainty that may have already have existed in antiquity. There are more than 70 titles attributed to Aeschylus in our sources, a number of which may be misattributed, and others are no doubt missing. In the circumstance, a number between 70 and 90 seems to be as close as we are likely to get to the total number.
There are two other points to notice in these statements. The first is the Suda’s mention of elegies, which we know from other sources that Aeschylus wrote and of which a few lines survive. Plutarch, in the first of his nine books of his Symposiaka (Table-Talk), Quaestiones Conviviales I.10.628d–e, tells us that Glaucias (an Athenian orator otherwise unknown) gleaned specific information about the battle of Marathon from Aeschylus’s elegy on the subject. The existence of this elegy may have prompted, but cannot confirm, the story that Aeschylus fled Athens after Simonides’ Marathon elegy had defeated his.
The second point concerns the statement in the Life that on top of 70 dramata, Aeschylus composed some five (? – the number is likely corrupt) satyrika, satyr plays, a genre of which he was recognised as the greatest practitioner (see Shaw, Chapter 14 in this volume). A treatise on style in literature attributed to an otherwise unknown Demetrius neatly labelled satyr drama “tragedy at play”, τραγῳδίαν
(On Style 169). As practised by Aeschylus and his successors, it used myths and the conventions of tragedy in a much lighter vein, with
choruses of satyrs and suffused, in Demetrius’s terms, with “laughter and charm”. So far as we know, Aeschylus’s satyr plays were all designed to follow three tragedies (the “trilogy”) to constitute the “tetralogy” (three tragedies and a satyr play by a single poet, performed as a set in competition with two other such sets at the festival known as the Great or City Dionysia). Might there at this time have been some opportunity for which no records survive to present satyr play apart from tragic trilogies? Or, if we assume the number in the text is wrong, might dramata here stand in, quite irregularly, for “tragedies”, and the requisite (lost) number of satyr plays correspond in fact to those needed to make up tetralogies? If that were the case, the total number of 70 would move to something over the 90 given in the Suda. Neither of these “solutions” seems probable and what the compiler of the Life had in mind here may not be recoverable.
Several of our sources offer information about important dates in Aeschylus’s life, drawn in all likelihood from official records. The so-called Parian Marble, a monumental inscription found on the island of Paros that recounts Greek history from 1581 to 264 bce, and thus was presumably carved in the mid-third century, provides dates (among much else) for poets’ births and deaths, victories in competitions and other noteworthy items of literary history (see Rotstein 2016). The Parian Marble informs us that Aeschylus fought in the battle of Marathon (490 bce) when he was 35 years old, and further that he died at Gela in Sicily at the age of 69. These entries both point to Aeschylus’s birth in 525/4 and death in 456/5. It further gives us the date of Aeschylus’s first victory in tragedy as 485/4 – also the year given for Euripides’ birth. We can add to these dates the Suda’s report that Aeschylus “competed” (sc. for the first time) at the age of 25. This is confirmed in the entry on Pratinas of Phlius, which specifies that this playwright competed with Aeschylus and Choerilus in the 70th Olympiad, i.e. 500–496.
There are brief “hypotheses” (statements transmitted in the manuscripts of Greek drama, usually containing a plot synopsis and critique) to six of the surviving plays, informing us that they were parts of victorious tetralogies, and name the other plays; five give their dates, presumably derived from official records. The sixth, Suppliants, can be dated at least approximately on the basis of a fragmentary hypothesis to the Danaid tetralogy, of which it was part, and contained in an Oxyrhynchus Papyrus published only in 1952. The fragment breaks off just where the date would have appeared, but since it names as one of the competitors Sophocles, who won first prize in 468 in what is said to have been the first time he competed, the tetralogy most likely dates to the mid-to-late 460s. Indeed, if the letters ἐπὶ αρ] conceal a name rather than the phrase ἐπὶ ἄρχοντος (i.e. in the year of eponymous archon X), that name, by process of elimination, would have to be Archedemides and the year 463.
The seventh, Prometheus Bound, is a special case; not only is no date recorded for its production, but a majority of scholars today do not consider the play that has come down to us to be the work of Aeschylus. A degree of consensus seems to be building around an attribution to Aeschylus’s tragedian son Euphorion. The strongest case for authenticity, however, is made by Herington (1970) and puts it at the very end of Aeschylus’s career, in Sicily.
Putting all this information together, we can construct this skeletal chronology:
525/4 Aeschylus son of Euphorion, born to an Eleusinian family, presumably in Eleusis. In addition to his father, the Suda names several other male relatives: three brothers Ameinias, Euphorion and Cynaegirus; and two sons Euphorion and Euaeon, both of whom were tragedians.
499–496 First tetralogy performed at the Great Dionysia.
484 First victory at the Great Dionysia.
476–70
Women of Aetna (Aitniai: the name could also refer to a chorus of nymphs of Mount Etna), performed in Sicily to celebrate Hieron’s founding of the city of
Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History
Aetna, possibly at its founding in 476/5, possibly some years later, perhaps on the same visit he made to perform Persians at Hieron’s request. This has usually been assumed to have followed on the 472 performance in Athens. A number of scholars now suggest that the play was written for and first presented in Sicily (see Bosher 2012, 97–111, but see Bell, Chapter 5 in this volume).
472 Persians performed as part of a victorious tetralogy consisting of Phineus, Persians, Glaucus of Potniae and Prometheus (satyr play).
467 Seven against Thebes performed as part of a victorious tetralogy consisting of Laius, Oedipus, Seven and Sphinx (satyr play).
463? Suppliants performed as first (or as some argue, second) play of a victorious tetralogy that included Egyptians (Aigyptioi, i.e. the sons of Aegyptus), Danaids (i.e. the daughters of Danaus) and Amymone (satyr play).
458 Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides performed as parts of the victorious Oresteia tetralogy, along with Proteus (satyr play).
456 Aeschylus dies at Gela in Sicily.
Aeschylus’s Character and the Character of His Plays
Depictions of the poet’s character are subject to the same kinds of elaboration and distortion that afflict biographical information. Pausanias, the second-century ce author of a Description of Greece in 10 books, records a charming story purportedly told by Aeschylus himself about the source of his inspiration (1.21.1):
Aeschylus said that when he was a boy sleeping in a field to guard the grapes, Dionysus appeared to him and ordered him to compose tragedy. And when it was day, since he wanted to obey, he attempted to compose and was already able to do so very easily.
The trope of a poet describing the moment of his poetic inspiration goes back at least to Hesiod’s invocation of the Muses who visited him as he was pasturing his sheep and “breathed a godlike voice into me” (Theogony 31–32). Pausnias’s version, about an apparently benign visit by a potentially dangerous god, may be one of the elements that led to the conclusion that Aeschylus (like more than one poet, ancient Greek or otherwise) was a drunkard who wrote his plays under the influence of the wine god. Plutarch, again in his “Table Talk” (Quaestiones Conviviales 1.5.1) says that “Aeschylus, too, composed his tragedies while drinking and thoroughly lit up” (διαθερμαινόμενον, literally “heated through and through”). Athenaeus (late second–early third century ce), in his huge compendium of information about eating, drinking and their attendant arts and pleasures, Deipnosophistai 10.48, repeats this, connecting it directly with one of the plays, Cabiri, sometimes called a satyr drama, but on Athenaeus’s evidence a tragedy, which is what makes the drunkenness scandalous:
For [Aeschylus] was the first and not, as some say, Euripides, to introduce the sight of drunkards into tragedy. For in Cabiri, he brings on Jason’s companions drunk, and with the thing the tragedian himself was doing, he besmirched his heroes. The fact is, he used to write his tragedies while drunk, which is why even Sophocles rebuked him, saying, “Aeschylus, even if you do the things as you should, you don’t know what you are doing”. Thus Chamaeleon writes in his On Aeschylus
A couple of things stand out here here: first, the reference to a treatise on Aeschylus by Chamaeleon, a pupil of Aristotle, brings this accusation against Aeschylus back to the late
fourth or early third century bce, even implicating Sophocles as an accuser. Secondly, and more importantly, we have a clear confirmation of one of Lefkowitz’s central points about poets’ biographies, the transfer of matter applied from a work to the poet’s life, which is here made quite explicit.
Indeed, the case for this practice in Aeschylus is particularly strong given the way that Aristophanes’ Frogs uses lines from Aeschylus to characterise the poet in his play. In this comedy of 405, shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides and just before the disastrous end of the Peloponnesian War, Dionysus has descended to Hades to bring Euripides back to the world above, but when the two finally meet, Euripides is about to engage Aeschylus in a spirited agōn to see which of them deserves to hold the chair of poetry at Hades’ table, and appropriately Dionysus is chosen to judge it. This agōn, extended over many rounds, provides clear descriptions of Aeschylus as a man of the Marathon generation, stern, haughty and very much the laudator temporis acti, the man who praises the past at the expense of the present. Aeschylean poetry is praised for its elevated seriousness (semnotēs) and his stagecraft for its many innovations; his work is criticised (largely but not wholly by Euripides) as written in an overly elevated, even ponderous style, full of monstrous, incomprehensible words unknown to the audience and irrelevant to contemporary life. Moreover, Aeschylean plots are faulted for lack of action and the complex twists and turns that enliven Euripides’ work. This characterisation is the foundation for the direct source of most descriptions of Aeschylus and his drama for centuries to come.
Aeschylus defends himself by invoking the noble traditions of the archaic poets, who taught the Greeks not only useful knowledge and skills, but also noble and beneficial habits. In particular it is the military prowess and courage of the heroes of old that he clams to instil in his audiences. His passion is manifest from the beginning of the scene, when Dionysus has to ask him to control his righteous anger, and he is entirely scornful of Euripides’ subtleties and sophistries, not to mention the “democratic” licence his rival exercises by allowing the highborn and the lowly, the virtuous and the shamelessly corrupt, men and women, citizens and slaves the right to speak at will. And it should be said that Dionysus’s decision to bring Aeschylus, rather than his beloved Euripides, back to Athens as the poet most likely to save the city is a vindication of the patriotism and practical wisdom of the older poet and the worth of his old-fashioned values.
It is, however, primarily the bluff, rough-edged, warrior-poet with the grandeur and awkwardness of his language and the lack of sophistication in his plots who comes down to future generations in the biographical and critical tradition, albeit alongside the recognition of his pioneering elevation of tragedy to a major form of artistic and cultural expression. What we are dealing with here is different from the elaborations and fictionalisation that characterise many of the anecdotes we have examined. Strange compounds like a bird called “the tawny horsecock” (Frogs 932) and difficult language in lyric passages are genuine Aeschylus, as are peculiarities such as characters who come on stage and remain silent for hundreds of lines before they speak. In the Oresteia, for example, Cassandra, who enters at about Agamemnon 782 only speaks from 1072, after seeming entirely unresponsive, and Pylades, who enters with Orestes at the beginning of Libation Bearers, does not speak until line 900, and then only three crucial lines.
The issue, then, is not one of authenticity, but of selection and emphasis. The examples given by Aristophanes are chosen for use in the ag ō n precisely because of their argumentative and satirical usefulness, not to represent the character of the poets or their work in a fair and balanced way. And yet, they are then adopted by biographers, critics and literary historians as a kind of shorthand to classify Aeschylus and his place in history: archaic, patriotic, belligerent, with rough edges, but nevertheless a grand and pathbreaking poet.
Aeschylus, the Creator of Tragedy?
The first two sections of this Introduction have focused to a considerable extent on the gaps and probable distortions in our sources for Aeschylus’s life and character. About his singular accomplishments and historical significance, however, we can speak with confidence. Aeschylus, the Creator of Tragedy, the title of Gilbert Murray’s 1940 book, is amply justified if we consider his role in the early development and full flowering of drama in Athens and beyond. The shadowy figure of Thespis was credited in antiquity as the first tragedian, in effect by separating an individual actor from the dithyrambic chorus, and single-actor tragedy continued to be written at the end of the sixth century and the dawn of the fifth. But as Aristotle claimed in Poetics 1440a16 – and there is no reason to doubt him on this – Aeschylus introduced a second actor onto the tragic stage. It is hard to overstate the significance of this innovation, for only then does drama in the full sense of the word become possible.
We have no examples of early single-actor tragedies, but there are scenes in extant Aeschylean plays that can give us an idea of their effect. In Persians, the Messenger who has announced the Persian defeat at Salamis departs at line 515, leaving only the Queen and the Chorus on the scene until 531, when the Queen, too, exits. After the choral stasimon, the Queen returns (598) to announce her preparations for calling up the ghost of Darius and to ask the Chorus to call up the ghost of Darius with propitious song while she pours libations; their chants and another stasimon follow (623–71). Suppliants offers several long tracts in which the Chorus and a single actor question and answer each other. In lines 234–489, although Danaus is present alongside King Pelasgus, it is only the Chorus and Pelasgus who exchange in dialogue, at first in spoken verse between the Chorus Leader and the King, and then in a commatic exchange, with the whole Chorus intensifying the emotional force of their plea through song and dance, while Pelasgus continues in speech mode. A structure entirely analogous to the exchange in Persians follows. After Danaus (503) and then Pelasgus (523) depart for the city to persuade the Argive people to accept the Danaids’ supplication, the Chorus is left alone on stage to chant and sing their prayer for success. Their father returns and, in the shortest episode in extant tragedy (600–24), tells them that Argos has granted their wish and promised them protection. They respond with a stasimon of thanks and blessings on Argos (625–709).
Such highly emotional and musically rich sequences work brilliantly, but one can see right away their limitation: the single actor provides information to the Chorus, who then react to it. There might at times have been doubt or disagreement expressed in their response, but where only one actor can appear on stage, there is no room for confrontations between individuals, and thus for the full development of conflict, in deeds as well as in words, the lifeblood of drama.
The addition of the second actor, then, is in itself enough to make Aeschylus the creator of tragedy in its full form, but in the Life and several other accounts it is just one item on a list of his enhancement of dramatic art. The Life lists as “very noble effects” Aeschylus’s introduction of “pictures and devices”, including “altars, tombs, trumpets, images and Furies”, and says he dignified the actors by giving them gloves, long robes and higher boots. As Lefkowitz points out, it is likely that all this was attributed to him because he was considered the first dramatist of lasting importance. What one can, I think, assert with considerable confidence is that throughout his career Aeschylus never ceased to experiment with poetic form, dramatic presentation and theatrical resources.
Although Aristotle attributes the addition of the third actor to Sophocles (Poetics 1449a18–19), others (including sources known to the author of the Life, who endorses the view) believe it was Aeschylus himself. Be that as it may, Aeschylus adopts the additional actor by the time of the Oresteia and puts him to special and effective use (see Knox 1979 for the remarkable effects achieved above all in the Casssandra scene).
