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Ancient Tragedy, Greece and Rome

Andrew Scholtz, Instructor

Ancient Tragedy, Study Guide. . .

Aeschylus Persians

Access to Readings

Aeschylus. Persians. Trans. Janet Lembke and C. J. Herington. Greek Tragedy in New Translations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Print.

Journal Topics

In addition to offering suggestions for discussion/questions to address in class, please ponder the following as you read, then write about it online:

What do you think the larger moral / message / "take-away" of this play (Aeschylus' Persians) was/is?

  1. What significance or meaning will it have held for spectators viewing it for the first time at the City Dionysia (Greater Dionysia), Athens, 472 BCE?
    • How does the Chorus of Persian elders — in effect, a kind of stage audience as well as stars of the show — respond?
    • How would Athenians have responded?
      • Pity?
      • Fear?
      • Other?
  2. What meaning does the play hold for readers/audiences today, i.e., for YOU?

Aeschylus' Persians: Introductory Comments

This play may be unlike any other you've ever read, seen, or performed. Indeed, the closest thing to it that I can think of may well be the kind of pageant a school might put on around holiday time. There are individual roles, but the main role goes to the chorus, while the action on stage is pretty much confined to stage-managing the narration of events off stage.

So in reading, you're going to want to think, among other things, about staging: how to make a play as stiffly hieratic and ceremonial as this one come alive?

Think also about what themes might have registered for its original audience of Athenians? For if we can be sure of one thing, this play was a huge hit! (It received the highly unusual distinction of an authorized re-performance. The tyrant of Syracuse also wanted it staged when Aeschylus visited there.)

Play Facts

Playwright

  • Aeschylus, 525/4 (?)-456/5 BCE
  • Athenian, member of a noble family
  • Fought in Persian Wars (Marathon, 490; probably Salamis & Plataea, too, 480-479)
  • First productions, early 400s
  • First victory, 484
  • Visited Sicily between 472-468, ca. 458-death
  • Perhaps 90 plays, of which 7 (6?) survive, depending on whether the Prometheus Bound is authentic

Play

  • Produced Greater (aka City) Dionysia, March 472 BCE
  • Tetralogy:
    1. Phineus
    2. Persians
    3. Glaucus of Pontiae
    4. Prometheus (satyr play, not the Prometheus Bound)
  • Tetralogy won first, Persians awarded re-performance
  • Scene: Susa, royal city of the Persian empire, before a building, perhaps royal palace. In front of the building is the grave of Darius
  • Cast:
    • Chorus of Persian Elders
    • Atossa, mother of Persian king Xerxes, widow of the late king Darius
    • Persian Messenger (bearing news of the defeat suffered at Salamis)
    • Ghost of Darius
    • Xerxes

Historical Context: Persia v. Greece

This is the only "history play" to survive intact from ancient Athens or from anywhere in ancient Greece. Like the two others we know of (viz., Phrynichus' Phoenician Women, Capture of Miletus), it deals with the great struggle between Greece and Persia in the early years of the 400s BCE.

By the time of that conflict, Persia had conquered a vast empire stretching from the banks of the Indus River, in what is now Pakistan, all the way to Egypt, Libya, Turkey, and parts of Romania, Bulgaria, and northern Greece. By the time of the Persian invasions of Greece in 490, Persia thus already held many Greek cities and regions subject to itself. That included Ionia, corresponding to what is now western coastal Turkey. (map)

Given the foot-hold Persia had already established in Europe, and given the nuisance Athens had made of itself by supporting the cities of Ionia in their revolt against Persian rule (499-494 BCE), Darius, the Great King of the Persians, decided to send ships and men to Greece to explore possibilities of further conquest. That expedition led to what we now call the PERSIAN WARS (490-479 BCE), a conflict with important implications for, among other things, Greek national identity.

That war's battles include some that continue to resonate today, including Marathon, which gave its name to a footrace; Thermopylae, which supplied the subject of the film 300; and Salamis, the subject of Aeschylus' Persians.

Here follows a brief outline of the war:

490. Darius' exploratory incursion into Athenian territory. Battle of Marathon, won by Athens.

483. Xerxes hews a canal through the Athos Peninsula.

480. Xerxes has a pontoon bridge built to span the Dardanelles, thereby connecting Asia to Europe. Xerxes in person leads his armies across that bridge (actually, two such bridges) from Asia to Europe (from what is now Asian Turkey into European Turkey). His ships sail to Greece hugging the shore and passing through the Athos Canal.

Xerxes encounters a Spartan army (the "300") under Leonidas at the pass of Thermopylae. Through treachery, the Spartans are killed to a man. Xerxes marches unopposed into Athenian territory.

Athens is evacuated ahead of the Persian army, which destroys it. Xerxes is tricked into giving naval battle under adverse conditions near the Athens-held island of Salamis. Alarmed, Xerxes withdraws back into Asia with part of his army and what remains of his fleet.

479. The other part of Xerxes army is defeated by Sparta and other Greeks at the land Battle of Plataea. The rest of Xerxes' fleet is destroyed at the Battle of Mt. Mycale (western coast of present-day Turkey).

Historical Context: Athens

Athens at the time was one of the two leading states of Greece, the other being Sparta. Greece, it should be pointed out, was no, single, unified entity politically, but a collection of independent city-states (poleis) and ethnicities.

As for Athens itself, it was, as our play notes, neither a kingdom nor subject to any other power. ("They're not anyone's slaves or subjects," p. 51.) It was, rather, a direct democracy. All adult citizen men (not just property holders) had full rights to vote, and many will have had access to high office. At the time in question, the leading politicians included Themistocles, architect of the victory at Salamis, and alluded to (not by name) in the play in connection with a famous deception orchestrated by him (57).

Play: Themes

This play may qualify as "historical," indeed, recent history from the perspective of its original audience. But its world view is thoroughly mythological. The Persian kings are treated as gods; Darius' ghost is likewise a divinity; divine forces shape the action at every turn. Notes C. J. Herington, it is through the eternal and the divine that the human here is to be understood.

That has a great deal to do with what may be the play's leading theme, what Herington terms the "the ancient law of hybris and ātē," through which anything "unduly great" (like the ambitions of a would-be conquering king) are cut down to size.

In class, I'll be lecturing on how that plays out in the Persians in relation to what I, drawing on Herington, call the tragic formula: a poetic-theological framework through which archaic and classical Greek poets like Aeschylus relate human misfortune to cosmic forces.

This "formula" can be said to feature the following elements, which look for in our play:

Koros. Abundant or excessive wealth or success, such as would breed. . .

Hubris. Either the kind of arrogance/insolence we associate with wrongdoers, or the acts themselves betokening such an attitude. Less a matter of purely moral badness, hubris is any attitude, word, or act betokening errant disregard for the status or dignity of another, whether human or god.

Ate ("AH-tay"). This is either the madness or delusion leading human beings to self-inflicted ruin, or ruin itself.

Dike ("DIH-kay"). Dike means "justice." The word does not show up in Aeschylus' Persians (it does in his Oresteia). But we can still see it as operative there. In Persians, understand dike as the re-balancing of a human-divine or human-human imbalance created by human koros and hubris. That makes dike both the aim of tragic action and the process through which it achieves that aim.

Action (Summary)

Aeschylus' Persians isn't always so very easy to follow. Especially in its opening sections, the extremely poetic diction (the translation accurately maps the Greek in that regard) can make it hard to divine what's being narrated.

So, the action is as follows. The Persian elders, left behind after the youth of Persia and its empire have gone off to fight under their king, Xerxes, in Greece, await news. We learn all this during the parodos, the Chorus' entrance number, which serves as the first scene of the play (no prologue). After the parodos, Atossa, mother of Xerxes, comes out to tell the Chorus her dream (it foretells defeat) and to seek advice. The Chorus advises her to pray for help from the gods.

A Messenger then arrives; he narrates in excruciating detail the naval defeat suffered by Persia at the Battle of Salamis ("Ajax's sea-pelted island," in the words of the Messenger). Note the gruesome vignette of the battle for the Island of Pan (in the straits of Salamis) — the savage slaughter inflicted by Greeks on Persians there.

Atossa leaves the stage while the Chorus performs by itself. The queen then returns with offerings for the grave of Darius, whom she and the Chorus summon forth from the world below.

Rising from the grave, Darius' ghost receives the bad news. Then comes the return of the defeated Xerxes; he and the Chorus lament their losses.

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