by Stuart Kelly
Just such an incident occurred in 456 B.C.E., outside the city of Gela, on the island of Sicily. The eagle would have glimpsed its prey and swooped. Still scanning the terrain, it located a suitable rock on which to crack the casing. As the bird’s claws withdrew, the tortoise would have briefly experienced a hitherto-unimaginable sense of acceleration, before being splintered and mangled. One variable, however, turned this instance of sophisticated predation into a much more remarkable occasion. It was no rock that the tortoise hurtled toward, but the bald head of an elderly Greek named Aeschylus. He was killed outright. History does not record the fate of the tortoise.
Luckily, Aeschylus had already written his epitaph. Like most Greeks of his age, he was proud of his status as a “Marathonomachos,” a veteran of the battle in 490 B.C.E. where the Athenians repelled the Persian king Darius’ invasion.
This tomb the dust of Aeschylus doth hide,
Euphorion’s son and fruitful Gela’s pride,
How tried his valor, Marathon may tell,
And long-haired Medes, who got the point full well.
He failed, however, to mention he was also the most revered playwright of his age, and that he had single-handedly transformed the nature of drama.
Aeschylus was born around 525 B.C.E. near Eleusis, a site sacred to the goddess Demeter, to which pilgrims would travel to be initiated into her cult, known as the Mysteries. As a counterbalance to the shrouded secrecy of the chthonian rites at Eleusis, Peisistratus, the relatively enlightened tyrant of Athens, had established forms of public worship, including an annual dramatic festival, sacred to Dionysus and performed in the heart of the city. By the time of Aeschylus, the Dionysian festival had mutated into a theatrical competition, and though to an extent it had become secularized, it was nonetheless rooted in religious significance.
According to the geographer Pausanias, Aeschylus had been commanded to become a writer by the god Dionysus. Apparently, on one occasion, the young dramaturge had been given the rather bemusing task of keeping an eye on some ripening grapes. As might be expected, he nodded off, and the wine god–cum–career adviser appeared in a dream to inform him of his new vocation. The next day he wrote a tragedy, with, so Pausanias claims, remarkable ease. His first plays were performed in the 480s; by 484, he had been awarded first place in the dramatic competition.
In Aristophanes’ play The Frogs, the irreverent satirist presents a debate in the Underworld between Aeschylus and the younger playwright Euripides. Although one must allow for a degree of caricature, and given that Aristophanes was born after Aeschylus had died, it still provides a glimpse into what was perceived to be his personality. He was irascible and conservative, a staunch believer in the power of drama to inspire military glory and civic duty. In contrast to Euripides, Aeschylus was the laureate of masculine heroism rather than feminine psychopathy. Some mocked his language for being grandiloquent, highfalutin, and abounding in such recondite concatenations as “hippococks” and “goatstags.” To others, Aeschylus’ style was rugged yet ornate, chiseled with gravitas.
In his lifetime, Aeschylus wrote over eighty plays. Only seven have survived, with copious fragments either persisting on papyrus or preserved in commentaries. The anonymous, though not conspicuously unreliable, Life of Aeschylus makes clear his significance:
Whoever thinks that Sophocles was the more effective composer of tragedies, thinks correctly, but let him consider how much more difficult it was in the time of Thespis, Choerilus and Phrynicus to bring tragedy up to such a level of greatness than it was for one entering the scene at the time of Aeschylus to bring it to the perfection of a Sophocles.
Before Aeschylus, drama had been more akin to a quasi-liturgical recitation or an oratorio. Thespis, according to Plutarch, was the first to add a hypokrites, an actor impersonating a character, who stood on a raised platform above the orchestra, where the Chorus would dance and sing hymns. Drama began when Thespis stood apart from the Chorus and announced, “I am the God Dionysus.”
The next development has been documented in the lost works of Phrynicus. Here, the solo actor would play a number of different roles, though the action was still predominantly performed through soliloquy. The major innovation introduced by Aeschylus was the presence of a second actor. The effect of this cannot be underestimated: monologue became dialogue, and with it the possibility for dramatic conflict, argument, irony, and reconciliation arose. It is for this reason Aeschylus is called the father of modern drama.
Aeschylus was also acclaimed as an innovator in his addition of elaborate stage machinery and painted effects. His actors were decked out in flowing robes, raised buskin shoes, and more ornate masks. He changed the role of the Chorus from passive commentators to integral participants in the drama, and, although his capacity for innovation may have waned, his willingness to respond to new theatrical practices did not. Sophocles introduced a third actor onto the stage, and in Aeschylus’ final, most acclaimed work, The Oresteia, he used this new triangle of players rather than the former limitation to protagonist and antagonist.
For all his radical advances, Aeschylus owed a debt to his predecessors. No genius emerges ex nihilo, and it is possible to discern the hints of influence from Phrynicus on his development. Phrynicus wrote works set in the sphere of contemporary history: one example, The Capture of Miletus, apparently so distressed the Athenians, and needled their sense of shame for allowing the Persian destruction of that city, that it was forbidden to be restaged, all copies were destroyed, and Phrynicus was fined. Out of pocket but unbowed in principle, he went on to write another, The Women of Pleuron, and another, The Persians.
Only one line of Phrynicus’ The Persians remains. Aeschylus used exactly the same opening line for his identically titled play—“Behold, most of the Persians have already set forth for Greece!”—yet the play that follows goes on to become his own. Aeschylus’ experience at Marathon and Salamis added telling details, such as the bodies of the drowned Medes held afloat by their oriental robes.
At the first performance of Aeschylus’ The Persians, the role of Chorus leader was taken by Pericles, the aspiring democrat who would rise to govern Athens at the height of its cultural, political, and military significance. Pericles and Aeschylus were both aware that Themistocles, the victorious and aristocratic general at Marathon, had taken the role of Chorus leader for Phrynicus’ The Persians. The play may not have been conceived as agitprop: that did not prevent it from being deployed for political ends. Throughout Aeschylus’ career there is a creative tension between myth and contemporary relevance.
Aeschylus was invited by the tyrant Hieron, ruler of Sicily and one of the few leaders whose military capability and cultural clout could rival that of Athens, to produce The Persians in Sicily in 471 B.C.E. It was not the playwright’s first visit to the court. Five years previously, he had moved there, furious at having been defeated by the young Sophocles. On that occasion, he wrote The Women of Etna, now lost, to commemorate Hieron’s construction of a new city. A description of Mount Etna’s eruption may have acted as a source for the conclusion of Prometheus Bound, where “dust dances in a whirling fountain” and “fiery lightning twists and flashes.” Hieron wished to be remembered as a patron of the arts, and cultivated men of genius. It was under his despotic rule, rather than in democratic Athens, that Aeschylus chose to live out his retirement, after the success of his masterpiece, The Oresteia.
At the dramatic festival, each playwright presented four plays: a trilogy followed by a satyr play. The trilogy originally described three linked aspects of a single myth: for example, Aeschylus’ earliest surviving work, The Suppliants, concerned the fifty daughters of King Danaus, who plead for sanctuary with King Pelasgus of Argos, to avoid an enforced marriage to the fifty sons of Aegyptus. It was followed by the lost The Egyptians and The Danaids, which presumably described how they relented, how their father then plotted that each daughter should kill her husband on their wedding night, and how one, Hypermestra, r
efused. A long speech by Aphrodite, goddess of love, survives from The Danaids.
Prometheus Bound represents more of a problem. It was followed, naturally enough, by Prometheus Unbound. The third part, all sources concur, was entitled Prometheus the Fire-bringer. This is odd, since it is the theft of fire from Zeus that precipitated the original binding. Despite the profusion of Christian scholars unpacking the pagan premonition of Christ in Prometheus Bound, none of them record how the trilogy ended. The answer to the conundrum may never be known, the crucial evidence atomized in the Egyptian sand.
The satyr plays that followed the trilogy were farcical dramas about serious themes, with a chorus of goat-legged satyrs led by their master Silenus. One example, the Cyclops of Euripides, remains, with sufficient fragments of Sophocles’ The Trackers for it to be reconstructed. Aeschylus was acclaimed as the master of the satyr play, and yet not one of his has escaped the insistent erosion of time. A smattering of lines—“The house is possessed by the God, the walls dance to Dionysus,” “he who hurt shall heal,” “Whence comes this woman-thing?”—are all that are left. We do not even have the Proteus, the satyr play that completed The Oresteia, except for the decidedly uncomical lines “a wretched, struggling dove looking for food, is crushed by winnowing rakes, its breast torn open.”
Aeschylus’ sole complete trilogy is The Oresteia, comprising Agamemnon,The Libation-Bearers, and The Eumenides. In the first play, Agamemnon returns home from the Trojan War, only to be murdered by his wife as punishment for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, is then faced with a moral dilemma: he has to avenge his father’s death, but to do so must commit the heinous crime of matricide. When he does, the insoluble problem unleashes the Furies, and the second play ends with Orestes hallucinating their approach, “shrouded in black, their heads wreathed, swarming with serpents.”
The Eumenides opens with those Furies now visible to the audience as the Chorus. This scene was so indescribably shocking that various members of the first audience miscarried, went mad, or ran out of the amphitheater. The goddess Athena intervenes in the action on stage to rebalance the moral equation. She institutes the first murder trial for Orestes on a hill called the Areopagus—the location, for the Athenian audience, of their court. Athena’s casting vote sets him free and transforms the vindictive Furies into beneficent Kindly Ones, or Eumenides.
The Oresteia moves from a chain reaction of revenge to a society determined to implement justice through reason, from savagery to civilization. The mythological subject matter is again replete with political resonance. The trilogy was staged in Athens in 458 B.C.E., when Pericles had become the leader of the democratic faction and was regarded as the major statesman of the period. The Areopagus had changed since the acquittal of Orestes, and become more of a legislative body for the aristocratic faction rather than merely a criminal court. Pericles had, therefore, taken steps to limit its authority, restricting it to murder trials.
Later critics have sought to argue that The Oresteia presents a patrician critique of Pericles: the Areopagus is divinely ordained and is central to Athens’ role as the paragon of civic virtue and enlightened behavior. Others have argued that Aeschylus is reminding Athenians of the original function of the Areopagus, and is thus tacitly supporting Pericles’ reforms. Whatever our interpretation, Aristophanes tells us that Aeschylus had a rather combative and critical relationship with his fellow citizens.
The enigmatic Eleusinian Mysteries of his birthplace offer a different reason for the bad blood between Aeschylus and the Athenians. From Aelian and Clement of Alexandria we learn that he was charged with revealing the Mysteries on the stage. At some point—aggravatingly, the sources do not record which, exactly—the audience was so enraged by the blatant infraction that Aeschylus was nearly murdered onstage and had to seek refuge in the temple of his onetime mentor, Dionysus. Sicily may have been altogether safer for someone who had, in Aristotle’s words, “spoken those things of which it is impious to tell.”
What secrets had he let slip? The Eleusinian Mysteries, supposedly, promised an afterlife. Homer had depicted the listless wasting-away that awaited even the heroic dead: the Mysteries offered an alternative. Just as Demeter had rescued her daughter Persephone from the Underworld, an initiate would not be trapped with the melancholic wraiths in the kingdom of Hades, but reach a paradisiacal place called the Elysian Fields. In The Frogs, Aeschylus boasts that although he is indeed confined to Hades, his name lives on in his work: of all the playwrights, only his plays are still staged after his death. Did the idea of literary immortality make him lax or dismissive about the orthodox paths to eternal life? Poets have always claimed that their work guarantees a kind of immortality. Aeschylus may have taken this boast more literally than the religious arbiters of his day thought fit.
Aeschylus did not know that his artistic canonization only occurred by the narrowest of margins. He had been warned in a prophecy that his own death would come by a blow from heaven, and, one presumes, made sure he did not sit under trees in Sicily’s countryside and run the risk of the appointed lightning bolt suddenly striking home. He probably even enjoyed the sunshine on his wrinkled, hairless head, musing about dear old Phrynicus; the excellence of Homer; Orpheus, who made the first lyre from a tortoise shell; and how he would be remembered.
He was not cremated—the epitaph tells us as much. But could he imagine that The Priestesses, Bassarides, Phineus, The Carding Women, The Sphinx, Europa, Hypsipyle, Niobe, Nereids, Oedipus, Laius, The Archer Maidens, Semele, The Nurses of Dionysus, Lycurgus, Atalanta, Nemea, The Award of the Arms, Mysians, Myrmidons, Sisyphus Rolling the Stone, Sisyphus the Runaway, The Net Drawers, The Bacchae, The Kabeiroi (or Drunken Heroes), Palamedes, Penelope, Pentheus, Perseus, Philoctetes, Phorcides, Psychostasia and Polydectes, The Young Men and Glaucus of the Sea, The Women of Salamis and The Women of Thrace, and many, many others would end as ash?
Aeschylus may have suspected his works deserved pride of place in a magnificent library. He knew enough about war to know temples were looted and palaces despoiled. He was acquainted with the whim of tyrants, and their penchant for surrounding themselves with genius. But no one could predict that the sole copy of his plays would become a casualty in a religious war between two theologies a thousand years in the future.
Sophocles
{495–406 B.C.E.}
THE GREEKS VENERATED Aeschylus and were challenged by Euripides; Sophocles, however, they loved. Even the rebarbative Aristophanes, in his lit-crit comedy The Frogs, gave a heartfelt tribute to the recently deceased playwright, saying that “Sophocles is getting on with everyone in Hades just as he did on earth.” Another comedian, Eupolis, eulogized him as “the happiest of men.”
Born in 495 B.C.E. in the provincial town of Colonus, Sophocles first comes to attention in 480, when he was chosen to sing, play the lyre, and, on account of his beauty, lead the victory procession naked, to commemorate the Greek defeat of Xerxes at Salamis. At the age of twenty-seven, he won his first dramatic victory against the renowned Aeschylus, who left Athens, mortified at the result. The decision was taken by Cimon, the military leader who had recently returned from Scyros with the bones of the legendary King Theseus. In an unexpected departure from normal procedure, the archon insisted that Cimon and his nine officers be appointed as the arbiters of the dramatic festival. Such a break with tradition was mirrored in the sudden toppling of the preeminent Aeschylus by the fledgling Sophocles.
Sophocles went on to write 120 plays, and was only ever awarded first or second prize in the festivals. Of these plays, only seven survive, with substantial fragments from one of his satyr plays, The Trackers. He was a close friend of Pericles. Like Pericles, Sophocles had a foreign mistress, Theoris, as well as an Athenian wife. His legitimate son, Iophron, was apparently infuriated by his father’s favoritism toward Sophocles the Younger, his grandson through Theoris’ child. The family feud ended in court, with Iophron claiming his father was senile. T
he ninety-year-old Sophocles read from his as yet unperformed Oedipus at Colonus: the judges summarily dismissed the case and punished Iophron for his unfilial behavior. It was perhaps at the same time that Sophocles made the pronouncement attributed to him by Plato: “I bless old age for releasing me from the tyranny of my appetites.”
We do not have in Sophocles’ seven plays an intact trilogy, as we do with Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Although Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone all deal with the ramifications of a single story, they were written at different times of his life, and were originally linked to other plays. Aristophanes mentions a play called Tereus, of which Aeschylus’ nephew Philocles wrote a derivative imitation. There is the lost Orithyia, a single line of which survives. Longinus, in his essay on literary style On the Sublime, favorably compared the death of Oedipus with the ghostly appearance of Achilles at the end of the lost Polyxena. (The scene was apparently only bettered in a poem by Simonides, which is lost as well.) There was an Athamas, about a father who vowed to sacrifice his children, and was himself nearly sacrificed when they escaped, and a Meleager,which may have dealt with the prophecy that the hero’s life would last only as long as a burning branch. His mother, after having preserved and treasured the charred wood, destroys it in a vengeful fury.
Our knowledge of Greek dramaturgy would no doubt be greatly enhanced if Sophocles’ essay On the Chorus had survived. As it is, all we know is that he increased the Chorus from twelve to fifteen, and that they acted as a substitute audience, rather than as a character (as in Aeschylus) or as an interlude (as in Euripides). Sophocles also wrote a paean on the god of medicine, Asclepius, and was known to be such a devout adherent of that divinity that the statue of Asclepius was left in his safekeeping. This too has perished.
