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Aeschylus (Critical Survey of Drama)

Other Literary Forms

A few surviving epigrams and elegiac fragments show that Aeschylus did not limit himself to drama but also experimented with other forms of poetic expression. The ancient Life of Aeschylus mentions that the playwright lost a competition with the poet Simonides to compose an elegy for the heroes of Marathon. Although Aeschylus’s entry was judged to lack the “sympathetic delicacy” of that of Simonides, the elegy, fragments of which were discovered in the Athenian agora in 1933, projects the dignity and the majesty that mark Aeschylus’s dramatic...

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