SOURCE: Spatz, Lois. “Aeschylus: Citizen and Poet” and “Persians: Monodrama.” In Aeschylus, pp. 1-35. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

[In the following essays, Spatz discusses Aeschylus's life, his society, and the state of theater in his time, and provides an overview of the Persians, including analyses of its staging, diction, and imagery.]

LIFE AND TIMES

This monument covers Aeschylus the Athenian, Euphorion's son, who died in the wheatlands of Gela. The sacred grove of Marathon with its glories can speak of his valor in battle. The long-haired Persian remembers and can speak of it too.

So reads the epitaph of Athens's first great tragic poet. This verse was composed by Aeschylus himself, according to Pausanias, the second-century a.d. geographer who wondered why the playwright neglected to mention his tragedies.¹ But it is not surprising that this particular poet who witnessed the birth of the Athenian democracy and then participated in its astounding defeat of the Persian Empire would define himself primarily as an Athenian citizen, a veteran of the battle of Marathon (490 b.c.). From his extant plays, it is clear that Aeschylus saw in these events a moral lesson which affected the choice and interpretation of the myths he dramatized for his fellow citizens. And it is also possible that he viewed his poetry as part of his duty as a citizen. In his comedy Frogs (405 b.c.), Aristophanes defined the best dramatist as the one who could make the Athenians better citizens and offer the city the best advice (11. 1009-10). On the eve of the Athenian defeat by Sparta, Aristophanes chose to bring Aeschylus, the symbol of the Marathon generation, back from Hades to save the state again.

Aeschylus did not witness the war with Sparta. He was born almost a century earlier, in 525 b.c., in nearby Eleusis, the center for the worship of Demeter and the Eleusinian Mysteries. The facts about his life are sparse.² His father was Euphorion, a member of a noble family. His brother, Cynegirus, died at Marathon and he himself may have fought at Salamis and other battles in the Persian War. He probably began to present tragedies early in the fifth century and won his first victory in the annual dramatic contest conducted by the city of Athens in 484. Five of his seven extant plays can be dated with certainty: Persians in 472, Seven Against Thebes in 467, and the three plays of the Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides) in 458. The Suppliants may have been produced in the 460s, whereas Prometheus Bound seems to be one of his latest plays (if it was in fact composed by Aeschylus).³ We do not know how many plays Aeschylus actually wrote; fragments from over fifty plays survive, and ancient sources list nearly ninety titles. Nor is it clear how many victories he won in the contests; perhaps he received thirteen first prizes during his lifetime, and then fifteen more were awarded to revivals of his plays after his death. There is also some confusion about Aeschylus's membership in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Although Aristophanes' Frogs (11. 885-87) suggests the poet was an initiate of the cult, Aristotle implies (Nichomachean Ethics, 3.1) that Aeschylus accidentally exposed one of its secrets. And, to defend himself against the charge of revealing the Mysteries, according to Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis 2.461), Aeschylus proved he never was an initiate. The poet probably traveled twice to the court of the tyrant Hieron of Syracuse in Sicily. On his first visit, he wrote a play in honor of Hieron's foundation of the new city of Aetna (476) and put on a performance of Persians for the ruler. He died at Gela during his second visit in 456. According to the ancient Life of Aeschylus, the grieved Athenians voted that anyone who wished to produce one of his plays at festival time should be granted a chorus by the official in charge.

In his lifetime, Aeschylus saw Athens develop from an insignificant polis (city-state) ruled by a tyrant into an energetic democracy which led the fight against the Persian attempt to dominate Greece.⁴ While Aeschylus was still a youth, the tyrant, Hippias, the son of Pisistratus, was driven out (510). Clisthenes, the leader of the reform, organized the citizens into ten new tribes with new officers, in order to unify the population of Attica and to break the power of the nobility. He also expanded the People's Council, which served as a steering committee for the Popular Assembly composed of all citizens (508). A reform instituted after Marathon opened public office to nonaristocratic landowners and thus reduced the nobles' control of the Council of the Areopagus, a body of ex-magistrates which functioned as a supreme court able to declare the assembly's laws or proceedings unconstitutional. By 462, Ephialtes passed a law which deprived the Areopagus of all judicial powers except those related to premeditated murder. Thus, the assembly, with its annually elected council and its own People's Court, gained complete control of the government. A few years later, the magistracies themselves, now offices for executing the assembly's will rather than initiating policy, were opened up to all citizens. Although hostility between the demos (common people) and nobles smoldered constantly and burst into crisis from time to time under rival leaders, the new democratic institutions worked in practice. Moreover, the demos, now directly responsible for policy and public affairs, became an experienced, informed, energetic, and patriotic citizen body. Herodotus reports on the effect of the political change.

Thus Athens went from strength to strength and proved, if proof were needed, how noble a thing freedom is … ; for while they were oppressed under a despotic government, they had no better success in war than any of their neighbors, yet, once the yoke was flung off, they proved the finest fighters in the world … so long as they were held down by authority, they deliberately shirked their duty … ; but when freedom was won, then every man amongst them longed to distinguish himself.⁵

The heroism of the Athenian response to the Persian invasion proves his point. When, in 500 b.c., their fellow Greeks in Asia Minor and the islands revolted against Persian taxes and tyranny, Athens and her ally Eretria were the only mainland Greeks to help the Ionian rebels. The revolt was a failure, but the Athenian intervention attracted the enmity of Persia. Ten years later, the Persians set out to avenge the interference. When they landed on the plain of Marathon, twenty-six miles from Athens, the citizen army, led by Miltiades, met and defeated a greatly superior Persian army. As the Persians retreated toward Athens, the Athenians suspected that aristocratic traitors were about to surrender the undefended polis. They marched back in such haste that they arrived in Athens before the Persian fleet. Seeing them camped outside the city walls, the Persians turned around and set sail for Asia.

Xerxes, the son of Darius, began a massive invasion of Greece in 483. While most mainland Greeks could not decide whether to fight, Athens, under the brilliant leadership of Themistocles, was already preparing its naval defense. When the brave Spartan troop under Leonidas was defeated by treachery at Thermopylae and the Athenian fleet could not stop the Persian ships at Artemision, the allied navy gathered at the gulf of Salamis to decide whether to make their next stand there or closer to their homes, in the Peloponnese. Themistocles prevented them from dispersing and leaving Attica undefended. Earlier he had evacuated his civilian population to Troezen and Salamis, interpreting the “wooden walls” the Pythia at Delphi had promised would survive the war as the ships of the Athenian navy. Now he manipulated the Persians into fighting the decisive sea battle at Salamis under conditions most advantageous to the Greek fleet. The result was a disaster for the Persian navy. Although the Persian infantry sacked Athens, desecrated its temples, and burned the Acropolis, they could not win the war after the Greek naval victory. With most of their ships destroyed, the Persian fleet withdrew and its army evacuated Athens for the winter. The Persians were able to reoccupy the city in the spring, but an alliance of Athenians and Spartans finally defeated them in a land battle at Plataea in 479. About the same time, an allied navy defeated the remnants of the Persian fleet at Mycale. At home, the Athenians began to rebuild their city. On the seas, the Athenians and Spartans joined with the Greeks of Asia and the islands in an alliance known as the Delian League to push the Persians back from the coast of Asia Minor. But when the allies became dissatisfied with the Spartan commanders, Sparta, with trouble at home, willingly withdrew and left Athens in control. Leadership of the Delian League brought a new set of problems, but the victory over Persia was complete.

The magnitude of the Athenian success was interpreted as a sign of divine intervention in history. Herodotus reports Themistocles' reaction to the Persian withdrawal from Salamis.

Indeed it was not we who performed this exploit; it was God and our divine protectors, who were jealous that one man in his godless pride should be king of Asia and of Europe too—a man who does not know the difference between sacred and profane, who burns and destroys the statues of the gods, and dared to lash the sea with whips and bind it with fetters.

(The Histories. 8.109, 535)

Aeschylus, an eyewitness to the events, dramatized this moral lesson in his historical tragedy, Persians. Godless pride inevitably brings divine jealousy and punishment to men. The cosmic justice illustrated by the divine response reaffirms the moral order and validates the political ideals that support it.

But Aeschylus may have feared that those political ideals were in jeopardy once the immediate danger of foreign intervention disappeared. Success against Persia was followed by intense rivalry for leadership at home (first between Themistocles and Cimon, with the support of Aristides, and then between Cimon and Ephialtes, whose successor was Pericles) and by disturbing changes in relations with Sparta and with the allies in the Delian League. Against this background of the polis in transformation, Aeschylus, in Persians and in his tragedies derived from myth, dramatized both the suffering of the past and the hope for honorable compromise that would preserve those Athenian ideals which were the source of their success.

TRAGEDY AS PUBLIC WORSHIP

Noted classicists such as Gilbert Murray and Gerald Else have termed Aeschylus the father of tragic drama.⁶ His Persians is the earliest Greek tragedy that has come down to us. It is a sophisticated play, where choral odes with elaborate meters alternate with episodes of dialogue between actors, which forces participants and spectators to examine the universal principles of morality and cosmic justice. Yet its antecedents are almost entirely unknown apart from the few titles of plays by earlier tragedians and the speculations of much later Greek and Roman writers.⁷

We can discern, however, some important differences between the ancient Greek theater and our own. First of all, it is clear that the origin and development of Attic tragedy are closely connected to the religious and political life of the people. According to the Parium Marble (almost the only universally accepted piece of evidence), Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens, in honor of the god Dionysus, established in 534 b.c. the Great or City Dionysia, an elaborate state festival culminating in several days of performances of tragedy. Throughout the classical age, plays were produced in places sacred to the gods on specific days set aside for worship. In the festivals at Athens, the citizens paid for, participated in, watched en masse, and then judged the performances and the performers. Thus, unlike our modern theater, Greek drama was religious rather than secular, a community product rather than an esoteric art form, and a state-supported rather than a commercial enterprise.

It is difficult to explain exactly why and how Dionysus, the god of wine and agriculture, became the patron deity of drama.⁸ Only one extant tragedy, Euripides' Bacchae, actually dramatizes a myth about him. His worship was tied to that of the grain goddess Demeter and the cycles of nature, to winter and summer, to planting, which the ancients viewed as the death of the seeds buried in the earth, and harvesting the crop, which they considered the rebirth of the seeds as vegetation. Typical Dionysiac myths show the god, who is himself killed and reborn in two versions, arriving at a new place, meeting resistance, and then finally overcoming the opposition (e.g., Bacchae). Behind these tales, some scholars suppose a ritual reenactment or cultic narrative of the forces of life struggling against and ultimately defeating the forces of death. Although the playwrights introduce so many innovations in the myths that tragedies cannot be considered rituals or reenactments, the typical tragic conflict which leads to a hero's struggle and defeat may have antecedents in the winter/resistance phase in the Dionysiac legend. Interestingly enough, after 486, comedy, which completes the cosmic cycle by celebrating the life force through the success of its lusty heroes, was added to the day's presentation of tragedies.

The seeds of the subject matter may be in the myths about Dionysus, but the devices and effects of drama probably go back to the way he was originally worshiped. Dionysus's cult was escstatic; participants used loud music, dancing, and, of course, wine, to liberate themselves from their individual identities. By putting on costumes, skins, and masks, they could transform themselves into the animals or heroes associated with Dionysus.⁹ Thus they were able to commune with and even take on the powers of the deity. The later dramatic festival supervised by the state, complete with sacrifices, processions, mummery, and drinking, channeled the religious drives toward ecstasy and communion into an orderly and socially cohesive form. The climax of the festival in the performances would offer the citizen an opportunity for a shared release from his limited private self. Actors, chorus, and audience together became participants in a dramatization of an event in sacred time which connected them to each other as well as to the ambiguous potency of divine and eternal nature.

The Great Dionysia was held at the end of March.¹⁰ As a preliminary to the celebration, Dionysus's statue was escorted by a torchlight procession from outside the city to his theater. Just before the official opening, the poets appeared with their actors to announce the subjects of the plays to be performed (proagon). The festival proper began with another procession, known as the pompē, which culminated in sacrifices in the god's sacred precinct. On the following days, the contests were held. The exact schedule is uncertain. At the time of Persians, three days were devoted to tragedy with each poet being assigned one separate day to present three tragedies and a satyr play. (The group was called a tetralogy.) A single comedy probably concluded the day's dramas. Each morning at daybreak the ceremonies began; after the theater was purified by a sacrifice and libations were poured, the herald announced the titles of the day's plays. At the end of the series of performances, judges voted on the order of merit and the victorious poet was awarded a crown of ivy in the theater. Official records of competitors and victors were inscribed in stone. Private individuals, proud of their participation, set up monuments to commemorate their contributions.

The entire community was responsible for the success of the Great Dionysia. The magistrate known as the archon epynomous had charge of the procession and the contests. He selected the poets for the competition and appointed the choregus or sponsor who would pay for the costuming and training of the chorus for one tetralogy. (The richest citizens were required to underwrite the performances in turn as a kind of income tax.) The choregus had to pick his chorus and its trainer from among the citizens. In addition he may have played some role in the choice of plays and selection of the judges. To the poet, and later the archon, belonged the responsibility for the selection, payment, and training of the actors (who were all male and professionals). The state developed procedures to ensure that the performances were evaluated fairly. The citizens who were selected as judges, by lot according to tribe from an approved list, had to swear they would give an impartial verdict. At the end of the Great Dionysia, the assembly scrutinized the conduct of both the officials and private citizens during the festival. The examination of public records, prosecution for misconduct (such as assault while intoxicated or seat-stealing), and the granting of public honor for extraordinary efforts assured the propriety of the celebration.

The dramatization of myth, which Pisistratus made the keystone of the festival, probably arose from the combination of two earlier and familiar modes of public communication: choral song and individual recitation. By the end of the sixth century b.c., group singing and dancing had developed from impromptu expressions of emotion into an elaborate genre which combined poetic or imagistic diction and structure, complex lyric meters, stylized dance steps, and accompaniment by a flutist.¹¹ Such choral odes would be performed at public occasions like funerals, anniversaries of the deaths of heroes, and religious festivals. Tragic poets themselves incorporated these familiar forms into the lyrics of their dramas.¹² The entrance song of the chorus in Bacchae imitates the cult song of a Dionysiac procession, whereas Aeschylus ends Persians and Seven Against Thebes with dirges similar to his audience's own funeral laments.

The actors' sections are different from the choral odes. The lines are spoken, or sometimes declaimed or chanted, in stichic verses imitative of the rhythm, diction, and logic of conversation or debate. Moreover, whereas the chorus narrates, witnesses, or reacts to important events, the actors perform as if they were the very characters involved in the crisis. This aspect of the drama has been traced to two main sources.¹³ Traveling bards (rhapsodes) who recited Homer changed their voices and expressions to match each character in the conversations and arguments of epic. Lyric poets too performed their compositions as people describing personal experience rather than narrating events. Early in the sixth century b.c., Solon, the lawgiver of Athens, had already used the verse forms which later appeared in the episodes of tragedy to defend his ideas to the public in his own person.

Other Greek city-states had the same kinds of public processions, emotional forms of worship and lament, and rhapsodes and poets. Yet only in Athens were these diverse elements combined to produce tragedy. Although it must have already had some artistic merit and popularity to attract Pisistratus's patronage, the first tragedy is attributed to Thespis in the Sixty-first Olympiad (536-533 b.c.), which corresponds to the date for the establishment of the Great Dionysia. Who Thespis was, and whether or why he created the form must always remain unknown. Scholars have speculated, however, that Pisistratus's motives for encouraging its development were political. At a time when the tyrant needed support to remain in power, he built up civic pride and patriotism by instituting great city festivals. He chose Dionysus as the patron of one because this agricultural deity was popular with the small landholders. He selected the new form tragedy because it had no association with the older aristocratic public celebrations. But whatever his reasons, the Athenian population responded with enthusiasm and support. New plays continued to be written by respected citizens of the polis, and contests for actors as well as poets were instituted. Gerald Else explains the effect of tragedy on the Athenian audience:

The Iliad with its dual vision of heroism and the tragic limits of heroism is the root of all tragedy. … But it took Thespis' act of genius to bring the Homeric vision into focus for a new age. The Iliad deals only with heroes; the common man is present only as a backdrop, stage setting, or else as the audience sitting and listening to a far off tale of long ago. Tragedy for the first time brought the far away directly into the present and the great man into direct contact with the little man. It did these two things through the twin devices of the “actor” and the chorus. Through the actor, who was the hero, standing before him, and the chorus, which was “like himself,” the ordinary Athenian was enabled to feel, to sympathize with the hero in a new way. Here all Athenians, noble and common alike, could meet on a common ground, in a common surge of emotional identification with the heroic spirit. All of this was done through forms—iambic verse, rhesis (speech), hymn, threnos (lament)—a living part of Athenian experience, and therefore sure of their emotional effect. Tragedy represented, in effect, the beginning of a new spiritual unification of Attica.¹⁴

FORM AND PERFORMANCE

The theater of Dionysus in which Aeschylus's plays were performed differs considerably from our standard theater building, housing a raised stage with a proscenium arch, curtains, and artificial lighting.¹⁵ The Athenian audience sat outside on benches set in semicircular rows on the southeast slope of the Acropolis. They looked down on the playing area at the foot of the hill, a huge round dancing floor fifteen feet in diameter called the orchestra (from the Greek verb orchēomai meaning “I dance”). Ramps on either side, known as eisodoi or parodoi (“entrances”) provided passageways for most of the entrances and exits required by the performers. At the time of the Oresteia, if not before, a stage building (skēnē) sat on the far side of the orchestra opposite the spectators. Its inside was used by the actors as a changing room. Its facade fronting the audience contained at least one door and provided a scenic background such as the entrance to a temple or palace. The door itself could be used by the actors for entrances and exits into a building, whereas the roof might be employed as an additional playing area. The structure may have stood on some sort of platform of two or three steps which provided a further playing area or stage, slightly raised but easily accessible to the orchestra. Two devices were employed in connection with the skēnē. To reveal a tableau of a scene described as having taken place within the building, a shallow platform on wheels, called the ekkyklema, could be rolled out of the opening in the facade. Hidden behind the skēnē, a huge crane, called the mēchanē or geranos or kiadē, requiring a firm foundation and a system of pulleys, functioned as a device to fly in gods for epiphanies. Although Aristophanes ridicules Euripides' excessive use of these devices, it is not clear whether a playwright as early as Aeschylus would have employed them.

By the time of Aeschylus's Persians, the play the audience watched had reached its classic form.¹⁶ Generally, but not always (v. Persians, Suppliants) it began with a prologue spoken by one or more actors who set the scene and provided background information. Then the chorus entered the orchestra and sang a lyric known as a parodos, probably from the passageway they came through. From then on choral odes, each called a stasimon (because the chorus remained in the orchestra to sing it), alternated with scenes of dialogue called episodes, with the division between the two parts usually marked by the entrance or exit of the actors. Sometimes the chorus and actor sang together in a lyric exchange called a kommos or lament. An actor himself might also sing or chant in lyric rhythms (recitative or parakatalogē) to express his intensely emotional state. On the other hand, when the chorus leader conversed with an actor within an episode, he would speak the verses the actors used. When the chorus sings lyric to which the actor responds with dialogue verse, the scene is called epirrhematic. The play concluded with an exodus, the ode sung by the chorus as it left the orchestra.

No more than three actors ever converse in the same scene in any Greek tragedy (although there may have been any number of nonspeaking extras). Moreover, tradition records that whereas Thespis invented the first actor, Aeschylus introduced a second, and Sophocles added the third and last. Thus, there must have been a rule or convention which limited the number of actors in each play to three. Perhaps the restriction developed as a means of controlling the expense or insuring that the poets entered the contest with the same limitations. (Probably for similar reasons, the number of chorus members was restricted.) But the fact that only three actors could speak in any one scene did not limit the number of speaking roles in a given play. Each actor could play several parts by changing his mask in the skēnē between episodes. The first actor, always the most important and the only one who could win a prize, generally portrayed the character who appeared on the stage in the most episodes. The second actor would play the other interlocutors, changing his identity as often as necessary. When an episode required still another speaker, the third actor would be employed. Libation Bearers is the only extant Aeschylean play that contains a three-way scene. In Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, however, Aeschylus introduced the third actor to make dramatic use of the silence of an important character who would speak later.¹⁷ But, in general, Aeschylean tragedy consists of scenes of confrontation between two actors or one actor and the chorus.

From the beginning of tragedy, the actors wore masks, perhaps because as sacred objects in earlier forms of worship, they could magically transform the actor into the character.¹⁸ But masks also had a more practical function; their use permitted an actor to play more than one role. Vase paintings and terra-cottas from the fifth century indicate that the mask-makers aimed at naturalism; they attempted to convey general characteristics such as sex, age, status, and even personality type. Thus, they varied the shade of the complexion, or the style and color of the hair, or slightly changed the cast of the eyebrows or mouth, or added a beard or wrinkles rather than actually distorting or exaggerating features. Sometimes additions such as a wreath for a herald, a tiara for royalty, or an exotic headdress for a foreigner further identified the character.

Although the tragic costume became standardized (as a long elaborately patterned tunic with long fitted sleeves) by the end of the fifth century, it is hard to determine exactly what Aeschylus's actors wore.¹⁹ Their garments were probably extensions of ordinary Athenian dress. Whether portraying men or women, all the actors wore the standard Greek undergarment, a tunic called a chiton, which could be belted with a girdle, and might be long or short, depending on the age, sex, and status of the character. In addition, one might wear or carry the common outer garment, the himation. There is some indication that tragic actors wore colors keyed to their roles; i.e., purple for kings, white for priests, yellow for young girls, or black for mourners, Cassandra, in Agamemnon, dresses in the special outer garments of a prophetess, whereas the characters and chorus of Persians probably had headdresses and chitons as well as tunics with patterns or lengths to indicate their oriental origins. A special boot called a cothurnus also was associated with the tragic costume. It had a normal sole and high uppers which were laced tight on males, but left loose on females.

Since actors wore masks which hid their facial expressions, they had to develop their characters by relying on their voices and gestures.²⁰ The theaters were large and the spectators in the last rows were far from the playing area. Thus, although the acoustics were excellent because the mountain slope itself and later the skēnē formed sounding boards, the actor had to learn to throw his voice clearly. He also had to be able to change his voice when he changed his role in the course of a play. Not only did the actor speak in rhythms close to conversation, but he often recited more elaborate verses to the accompaniment of a flute (recitatives) and sometimes even sang in lyric rhythms. Thus, his vocal skills were more like those of an opera singer's, and he was judged in similar terms. Moreover, he had to develop skill in using gestures and rapid movements to compensate both for the absence of facial expression and the distance from his audience. The clarity of his gestures would be particularly important since his adherence to or deviation from his society's fixed procedures for approaching others (i.e., the rituals of supplication, libation, prayer, mourning) would convey to the audience the gravity of the situation and his own attitude to the established rules of behavior.²¹ Indeed, some scholars have suggested that the three-actor limit evolved naturally because it was difficult to find men with so many talents.

In Aeschylus's time, the chorus was as important as the actor and far more difficult to prepare for the production.²² It was composed of twelve men (fifteen in Sophocles and Euripides) who were chosen from a pool of citizens skilled in singing and dancing. The chorus probably dressed in simple costumes and masks which identified their sex and station. Exactly how they performed is not certain.²³ They were led into the orchestra by a more elaborately dressed flutist who accompanied their songs. Once there, they grouped themselves into a rectangular formation, according to ranks and files. The leader of the chorus, the choryphaeus, who spoke for the group would probably be in a prominent position, visible whether addressing his companions or the actors. Although the stanzas of a choral ode are usually divided into two metrically corresponding parts (strophe and antistrophe), there is no evidence to suggest that the chorus divided in half to sing or dance to each other. Aeschylus himself is said to have invented many of the movements and gestures which became standard accompaniments to the odes. These dances probably consisted of a combination of steps and turns with fixed poses or attitudes (schemata) that imitated the gestures expressive of common activities or emotions. Dirges must have been accompanied by the beating of breasts and the tearing of hair and cheeks, and perhaps even bending, kneeling, or falling to beat the ground to arouse the dead or depict despair.

We can assume that the producers of Greek tragedy were aiming in part to create an illusion of reality.²⁴ The audience, used to imagining the picture from the word, would not expect scenic realism as we define it today, but, in fact, most actions described in the text as occurring before the spectators' eyes could be easily performed by the actors. Events which could not be represented believably in the playing area (i.e., murders, storms, battles) usually happened “off-stage” and were described by messengers. Nonetheless, several conditions in the theater required that the audience accept certain conventions about the performance.²⁵ The plays were acted out in broad daylight in an open area without curtains, a roof, or artificial lighting. The audience had to imagine there was darkness if a performer carried a lantern or announced that it was night. They had to visualize the open space, or altar, or later the facade of the skēnē as whatever setting the drama required. In the early plays, the audience's imagination was limited only by the text. They could visualize the open space as any interior room or outdoor scene the characters indicated. Once the skēnē was used to represent a building, however, the audience was by definition outside. They had to accept the presentation of intimate conversation as taking place outdoors in public or the representation of the interior scenes in tableau on the platform (ekkyklema).

Any theater audience must pretend that the actors are the characters they represent rather than the people they know they are. In the modern theater, whether arena or proscenium, the darkened auditorium separates the spectators, psychologically as well as physically, from the illuminated playing area. No such barrier existed in the Greek theater; the daylight shone on both the orchestra and the benches; the first rows of patrons were on the same level as the chorus, and the spectators, like the performers, were citizens who might be participants in the next dramas of the Great Dionysia. Perhaps the depersonalized masks and costumes, as well as the dancing and music, helped to create the illusion that transported the audience from the busy world of contemporary Athens to the timeless realm of myth. In tragedy, this barrier between the two worlds is never broken by direct communication between the performers and the audience, by topical allusions, or even by references to the “theater” as a metaphor for life.²⁶ Thus, the audience never participates or is made self-conscious by the performance, as happens frequently in Old Comedy. Rather, the audience at a tragedy loses its own identity in the sustained dramatic illusion and empathizes with the heroes and chorus of a sacred past which it recognizes as its own.

Information about the audience, like everything else, comes from later sources and may not reflect its constitution and character in Aeschylus's lifetime.²⁷ The stone theater must have accommodated about 15,000 seats with standing room for a few thousand more. In the beginning, the spectators were citizens of Athens who knew one another and shared a common political and public life. Women and boys were probably admitted as well, although they might have been required to sit high up in back, separated from the men. The best seats, those in front, nearest the orchestra, were reserved for important public officials and visiting dignitaries. When Athens, as ruler of the Delian League, became the center of the Greek world, the Great Dionysia was crowded with ambassadors and private citizens from city-states throughout the Mediterranean.

The audience arrived at dawn and sat through three tragedies, a satyr play, and one comedy. This feat demonstrates their stamina at the very least, but does not indicate what the spectators took away from the drama. Anecdotes related by the ancient commentators indicate that audiences were very noisy when they wanted to show their disapproval; they hissed, whistled, or kicked their heels against the backs of their seats. On the other hand, a good actor or a moving plot could draw tears. In addition, we read that the audience reacted to individual lines; for example, they interpreted verses of praise for the character Amphiaraus in Seven Against Thebes as a description of Aristides the Just, who was present at the performance (Plutarch, Life of Aristides, 3). Aristophanes compliments the Athenians on their ability to recognize allusions and judge the technical elements of tragic poetry in Frogs, but we cannot really assess their critical faculties from his broad parodies of tragic style.

The fact that Old Comedy does parody the plays and the playwrights, however, testifies to the enormous interest they generated. Many critics, ancient and modern, have attempted to understand the way the best tragedies affected the audience.²⁸ While Aristophanes emphasized their social role in making the spectators better citizens, Gorgias, Plato, and Aristotle analyzed their ability to stimulate feelings of horror, pity, indignation, and compassion by dramatizing the suffering of others. Recently Oliver Taplin has stressed the complexity of the emotions aroused: the way the audience both fears and desires the terrible event, the “paradoxical pleasure” of these “doleful feelings.”²⁹ But he points out that the emotional is indivisible from the intellectual effect. The focus on the suffering of strangers creates a distance from the trivia and traumata of private life which enables the audience to view suffering from a different and broader perspective. Moreover:

… the events of the tragedy are in an ordered sequence, a sequence which gives shape and comprehensibility to what we feel. And, most important of all, the affairs of the characters which move us are given in a moral setting which is argued and explored in the play. They act and suffer within situations of moral conflict, of social, intellectual, and theological conflict. The quality of the tragedy depends both on its power to arouse our emotions and on the setting of those emotions in a sequence of moral and intellectual complications which is set out and examined. … Tragedy makes us feel that we understand life in its tragic aspects …, that we can better sympathize with, and cope with suffering, misfortune, and waste.³⁰

… we shall examine how Aeschylus created, through story, poetry, and production, emotional experiences which his fellow Athenians appreciated as beneficial and which still have the power to affect us today.

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PLOT SUMMARY

Persians was produced for the Great Dionysia of 472 and was awarded first prize. It was presented as the second play of a tetralogy and seems to have had no relation in plot or theme to the other three plays of the group, Phineus, Glaucus Potneius, and the satyr play Prometheus.³¹ The drama begins with a parodos in which a chorus of Persian elders enter the orchestra, and explain that they were left behind to watch over the empire while Xerxes led his mighty forces against Greece. By now they have become anxious because they have heard no news of the expedition. As they speculate on the outcome, Atossa, the queen mother, enters to express her own anxieties. Her fear for her son and the nation has been intensified by a recurring dream. In the dream, she sees an argument between two sisters, one dressed as a Greek and the other as a Persian. Xerxes, trying to yoke the sisters under the chariot, as if they were horses, is thrown by the Greek one, while Darius, his dead father, stands by, pitying but helpless. To avert the catastrophe portended by the dream, the queen had gone to make offerings to Apollo. At his altar, however, she watched terrified as a hawk tore apart an unresisting eagle, symbolic of the destruction of the empire. The loyal chorus advises her to supplicate the gods and take offerings to the dead, especially Darius, to counteract the omens. Atossa lingers to question the elders about the purpose of the expedition and the nature of the enemy.

As they converse, a Persian courier runs in to announce that most of the expeditionary force has been destroyed. The chorus laments in a series of brief lyrics to which the messenger responds in iambic couplets. At first, the queen is struck speechless with horror, but she recovers and requests a detailed report from the courier. After assuring her that Xerxes is still alive, he lists the dead, describes the naval defeat at Salamis, and recounts the army's disastrous flight from Greece. When the queen goes back to the palace to offer prayers to the gods, the chorus sings a lyric lament for the dead, bewailing the loss to families and the state, and contrasting Xerxes' leadership with his father's. The queen returns to bring gifts to the tomb of Darius. As she pours out libations, the chorus calls on the spirit of the dead king for help. The ghost of Darius rises from the tomb, and questions his wife while the awe-struck chorus stands by. Darius interprets the disaster as a punishment from the gods brought on by Xerxes' arrogant yoking of the Hellespont in his lust to join Greece to his Asian realm. He praises the temporate rulers of the past and then predicts further woe because of his son's desecration of the Greek shrines. After advising the queen and chorus to comfort the returning king, Darius departs, and the chorus sings a eulogy to him. Xerxes then enters, humiliated by the disaster he has brought upon himself and his country. Together the defeated monarch and the chorus lament and leave the orchestra as if proceeding to the palace.

HISTORY AND POETRY

When Aeschylus chose to dramatize the Persian reaction to the disaster at Salamis, he was following the precedent of Phrynichus's Phoenician Women (476 b.c.) to which he alludes in his first line. Many of the spectators must have participated in the battle (480 b.c.) or at the very least endured the hardships of the Persian invasion which culminated in the sack of Athens. Therefore, we can assume that Aeschylus probably recounted the major events of the naval defeat accurately; most of the details conform to Herodotus's account. For dramatic purposes, however, he chose to emphasize and even distort certain aspects of the conflict between Greece and Persia.³² First, he makes Salamis the most important battle, the defeat which lost Xerxes the war and the empire, and slights two major battles which were equally important. Plataea, where the Spartans led a land victory on the Boeotian plain, is barely mentioned, whereas Mycale, a naval victory off Asias Minor, also led by a Spartan, is omitted entirely. Clearly Aeschylus wanted to emphasize the battle of Salamis because it was Athens's owns victory, initiated by her leaders who were fighting in her waters for her very survival.

Yet, for a different reason, Aeschylus almost completely ignores Marathon, another Athenian victory (over Darius ten years earlier in 490). To heighten the impression of Xerxes' rashness, Aeschylus created a Darius who by contrast was so wise and temperate that he confined his conquests to Asia and the islands. But in fact the father was as rash as the son. Darius also attempted to yoke together two continents, when he bridged the Thracian Bosphorus in order to invade Scythia, and he too attacked the Greek mainland, to punish Athens's and Eretria's interference in the Ionian revolt. The Battle of Marathon was his disaster. Herodotus reports that Darius eagerly planned a new expedition, but that, ironically, it was Xerxes who, when he came to the throne, was at first unwilling to proceed.

Nor was the defeat as disastrous and Xerxes' flight from the battle as humiliating as Aeschylus maintains. He led his troops back to Thessaly, left part in winter quarters there, and marched most of his army to the Hellespont where they rested until they could enter Sardis, far fewer in number, but in great and orderly splendor. In 472, Xerxes was still on the throne and the fear of new Persian aggression still existed. But the depiction of a total disaster must have provided an illuminating moral lesson for the Athenian audience and diminished their anxiety about the possibility of future confrontations.

Furthermore, by presenting the Athenian victory from the Persian perspective, the playwright was able to praise the ideals and accomplishments of his polis without seeming arrogant and self-serving. The Athenians appear more heroic because the description of their courage, cunning, and prudence comes from the defeated enemy. Even while the chorus glorifies Darius by cataloguing his Ionian subjects, Aeschylus is reminding the audience of the immensity of the Greek victory. These very Ionians, who had fought with Xerxes at Salamis, were liberated by the war. In fact, the poet's use of the name “Ionians” to signify the mainland Greeks who defeated Persia (e.g., 11. 178, 950, 1025) connects these two groups of Hellenes who would be allied in the Delian League.³³

Aeschylus also builds a contrast between Persia and Athens which justifies the Athenian victory. The constant references to the immensity and extravagance of Persia, symbolized by the abundant gold, create a picture of an entire society which possesses more than its allotted portion (Moira). Athens, on the other hand, is small, and its prosperity comes not from gold but silver, symbolic of its public spirit instead of wealth. The audience, hearing the reference to its silver mines, would be reminded that they had followed the advice of Themistocles and built a navy with the profits of a new vein instead of voting to enrich themselves.

The Persian obeisance to their royal family (as if they were gods, not men) provides another implicit contrast. Athens has no single individual as powerful and despotic as Xerxes or Darius. The conspicuous absence of Themistocles' name effectively dramatizes that the Athenians share equal responsibility for the destiny of their polis. More important, its citizens are free; the Persian courier tells the queen, “Slaves of no one, they are called, nor in subjection to any man” (1. 342). But the Persians are not only enslaved to their rulers; they are also the enslavers of others. After hearing the report of disaster, the chorus laments the loss of its empire:

They throughout the Asian land
No longer Persian laws obey
No longer lordly tribute yield,
Exacted by necessity;
Nor suffer rule as suppliants,
To earth obeisance never make:
Lost is the kingly power—
Nay, no longer is the tongue
Imprisoned kept, but loose are men,
When loose the yoke of power's bound,
To bawl their liberty.

(11. 584-94)³⁴

Some scholars conjecture that Aeschylus chose his subject to do more than remind the Athenians of their accomplishments.³⁵ In the 470s, Themistocles' popularity was being undermined by his political rivals, Cimon and Aristides. By 472, he was on the verge of ostracism and exile. It is possible that Aeschylus wanted to remind the Athenians of their debt to Themistocles in order to prevent his condemnation. Although the poet never mentions the Athenian leader by name, he does focus attention on him in various ways, e.g., by exaggerating the importance of Salamis, by mentioning Themistocles' trick that forced the naval battle (11. 355 ff.), and by alluding to his various policies.³⁶ But the chronology of Themistocles' fall is too uncertain and the tragedy's references too vague to assess what Aeschylus's position really was. Perhaps the play, in glorifying the Hellenic union at Salamis, is much more a condemnation of the present dissension at home and abroad than a plea for one man's reputation.

In any case, Aeschylus was not writing a history or a political treatise. To enable his audience to recognize the eternally true pattern of life implicit in the specific Persian defeat, the poet had to remove his audience from the battlefield. He accomplishes this separation in several ways. By setting his scene in far-off Persia, he takes the drama out of the familiar environment of Athens and adds an aura of exotic remoteness. In addition, he portrays the famous people of history unhistorically, both by giving them unexpected characteristics and by assigning them roles which transform them from unique personalities into general character types. Moreover, through his imitation of epic style and story, he sets up a parallel between the contemporary event and the events of a more heroic past, ennobling the participants and increasing their remoteness in time. The distance created allows the poet to intertwine human action and divine response so that the audience can appreciate the paradigmatic significance of their history.

The scene of the drama, the Persian capital of Susa, is fabulously wealthy and very un-Greek. The long lists of Persian people and places, the many loan words from the Persian language, and the exotic Persian costumes reinforce the remoteness of the action from Athenian life. Even when the Persian courier must describe the sites and details of the battle, he mentions no Athenians by name.

Aeschylus also endows his characters with features that distinguish them from the real people associated with the event. The male rulers do not appear before the spectators as the mighty despots so hated by the Greeks. Rather, Darius is a godlike ghost who justifies the Athenian victory, and Xerxes stands before his subjects humiliated and powerless. The chorus are not the dread warriors who sacked Athens and desecrated her shrines; they are wise, reverent old men who recognize divine will in their disaster. Aeschylus intensifies this fictionalization of the Persians by portraying them as general types. Atossa's character provides the best example, since she so clearly reacts to events as a Mother or Wife as well as a Queen. Xerxes and Darius also function as Son and Father as much as Bad Ruler and Good. The chorus, too, as the respected advisor, plays the general role of Citizen.

Allusions to epic increase the Persian's remoteness from contemporary history. Through the use of epic diction and style, the clash between Greece and Persia becomes associated with that grand battle of the past, the Trojan War, fought in a greater time when men were more heroic and gods actually intervened directly in human events. Imitating the formulae of the Iliad, Aeschylus catalogues the names of the Persian warriors who marched off to battle or died with honor (11. 21-56, 302-28, 958-99), identifying them with the valiant heroes of the past. Moreover, the poet uses the story pattern of the Odyssey and the return sagas of the epic cycle (where the hero struggles to reach home while his subjects and family anxiously await his arrival) to introduce a parallel between Xerxes and Odysseus (or the other heroes of return sagas).³⁷ Xerxes' return, however, is a tragedy because, in contrast to Odysseus, he cannot set his house in order. He is the destroyer, not the savior, and his arrival confirms rather than allays the Persians' worst fears.

As in epic, so in the battle of Salamis, Xerxes' failure is not ascribed only to Athens's bravery and cunning. In the myths of epic, situations contain more meaning because human behavior provokes a divine response which illuminates the eternal principles of cosmic order. In Persians, too, the poet makes clear that the gods themselves were punishing Xerxes for his transgression of eternal laws which bind all men, even emperors of mighty Persia. Since the spectators confront the defeated, who indirectly praise them while praying and lamenting in familiar ways, the spectators can extend their sympathy to these fellow human beings in their suffering, while at the same time approving, as the characters themselves do, the divine resolution. But the spectacle could not lead the Athenians to gloat over their victory because the action forces them to recognize that they are not solely responsible for the outcome of the battle. If they identify with the Persians, they may recognize their own propensity for moral error. Darius proclaims that his nation's fall must serve as a warning against the ambitions of all future nations. Thus, when the temporal event is revealed to have a cosmic significance, the spectators themselves become aware of their participation in the universal moral order.

The awareness of the gods' intervention develops at the same time as the characters' sense of dread increases. The chorus mentions as early as line 93, in a passage about the invincibility of the expedition, that the divine spirit Atē (Ruin) often leads men into traps; although they refer here to the Greeks, the lines also ironically allude to the Persian debacle. The courier suggests that some god (daimon, 1. 345) defeated the army, and later cut off their escape on the frozen river (11. 495-502, where forms of theos appear three times). The strongest evidence of divine concern comes from the gods themselves, however. Atossa's dream and then the destruction of the eagle, the royal bird, at the altar of Apollo are accepted as direct messages from the other world. The Darius who rises from the dead is more than the former king. He confirms his authority with the gods of the dead before he proclaims both Xerxes' responsibility and the gods' partnership in the disaster (11. 742-50, 819-26).

The relation between the temporal and the cosmic is intensified by the way in which the present action, Xerxes' return, is set into a time frame which shifts from immediate past, to more distant past, to present, and even to the future.³⁸ This is accomplished through such devices as the chorus's memory of the troops' departure, the messenger's report, Darius's survey of the Persian past, and his prediction of the defeat at Plataea. Although there is unity of time in the simple plot of the return, that present moment is connected to all other significant moments in a way that reveals a pattern of relations between the human and the divine. Darius, who summarizes Persian history, also offers a general statement of the unchanging universal:

Insolence [hubris], once blossoming, bears
Its fruit, a tossled field of doom [atē], from which
A weeping harvest's reaped, all tears.
Behold the punishment of these! remember
Greece and Athens! lest you disdain
Your present fortune, and lust after more,
Squandering great prosperity,
Zeus is the chastener of overboastful
Minds, a grievous corrector. Therefore advise
Him [Xerxes], admonished by reason, to be wise,
And cease his overboastful temper from
Sinning against the gods.

(11. 821-32; Benardete, trans.)

LIVE PERFORMANCE

The play was much more than its plot, however. Aeschylus directed a performance for an audience who could see and hear the chorus and characters move in and out and around the orchestra. But we do not have any stage directions, notes about the dance and musical accompaniment, or even an undisputed reconstruction of the playing area …. What we do possess is the text itself, with its lyric rhythms related to other genres or public ceremonies, and its characters' own references to their actions, costumes, and companions. From the clues in the texts, we shall focus on certain features of the total production which seem to affect the audience's reaction and underline the poet's themes.

For a modern audience, used to awarding prizes for scene design and costuming, “spectacle” is the most easily comprehensible element in the production of tragedy. Although there could be no elaborate set in the Theater of Dionysus where the chorus had to have room to dance, Aeschylus was known in antiquity as the most spectacular of tragedians for his use of visual effects.³⁹ In Persians, three devices reinforce the impact of the action. The most obvious is the raising of the ghost of Darius, which is all the more shocking because it is unexpected. We are awaiting Xerxes, not his father. Although the dead king has been mentioned earlier in different contexts, we only expect the queen to make offerings and the chorus to pray for blessings from him. Instead, she advises the chorus to conjure the dead king, whereupon they sing a lyric in rhythms and formulae that the Greek audience would recognize as an invocation of a divinity (hymnos kletikos).⁴⁰ The preliminaries and actual arrival confirm Darius's claims that he is a god and thus add authority to his predictions and moral pronouncements. It is not exactly clear how the ghost's appearance was staged. The text suggests a vertical movement; he comes up and goes down. Perhaps some temporary structure at the edge of the orchestra over an underground passage or the mound (pagos) that was later leveled represented the tomb, and the actor playing Darius came up from behind it. Or he may have simply walked in through the passageway.⁴¹

Darius's appearance brings up a second feature of the spectacle—the costuming. The dead king appears in all his royal finery, wearing saffron slippers and an elaborate feathered tiara. (11. 659-62). It is assumed by critics, ancient and modern, that the Persian characters wore Persian garments, that is, unusual headdresses, long-sleeved ornamented robes, and patterned trousers.⁴² Since these would have seemed very exotic and lavish to the audience, they would increase the ambience of excess which the words of the text ascribe to Persia. But if the poet emphasizes their wealth and self-confidence through the costumes, he turns this device to unusual use. For, when Xerxes returns in defeat, his finery is probably ragged and tattered. Aeschylus calls attention to the king's rags in his mother's dream, the messenger's account of his rending his clothes in response to the battle, Darius's advice to reclothe him, and Atossa's desire to obtain a fresh garment suitable to his position. When Xerxes finally appears, the difference between his rags and his father's royal splendor heightens the contrast between the old man's stability and success and the youth's folly which led to disaster. As the chorus escorts Xerxes to the palace, he instructs them to rend their garments. This gesture, which accompanies their final dirge, symbolizes the rending of the Persian empire and the destruction of its good fortune.

Aeschylus was also famous in antiquity for his elaborate entry scenes.⁴³ In Persians, he uses the audience's expectations about oriental pomp to underscore the Persians' increasing degradation. As the characters' hopes fall, the ceremonial splendour of the royal entrances decreases. The queen's first and second entrances must have been radically different from each other, for, in lines 607-8, when she returns from the palace, she mentions that she has come this time without her former luxury and her chariots. Thus, she probably made her first entry in a grand procession, in a chariot, accompanied by servants, and dressed in her official robes. But after the courier has announced the disaster, she comes without the external symbols of power and prosperity. Taplin suggests that she may even be wearing the black robes of mourning.⁴⁴ The contrast underlines her change in fortune while at the same time adds to her dignity since she so nobly accepts the blow.

Scholars do not agree about the precise manner of Xerxes' entrance, but it is clear that he comes before the spectators without the authority and dignity of his mother and father.⁴⁵ His arrival, far from triumphant, presents an implicit contrast with the way he set out on the expedition. In the parodos, the chorus proudly describes the departure of the armament and its leader, emphasizing its size and splendor by recurring references to numbers and gold and by actually naming the many subordinates from many lands who led their own troops in Xerxes' train. Although we cannot see that “gold-laden” army (poly-chrusos, gold-laden, appears in lines 9, 45, and 53), that “solid column of war” (1. 19), we are impressed by the chorus's picture of its epic might and magnificence. But the return of the troop is very different. The text suggests that Xerxes' robes are tattered and that he is alone (1. 1036: “I am stripped of my escort.”). The whole lament emphasizes the heroes who have been lost in battle. To the chorus's recurrent question, Xerxes must respond with the confirmation of another death. The chorus ends the long catalogue of fallen warriors with a simple phrase: “Little left from so many” (1. 1003). In fact Xerxes' present escort effectively represents his change in fortune. Instead of a huge troop of young men, the wealth and flower of all Asia, he is now guided home to a funeral by a small chorus of men too old to fight.

Although we have little information to help us imagine the lyric and dance, we can point out a few aspects of this part of the production, from the text and our knowledge of other lyrics. The drama begins and ends with the chorus. There is no prologue spoken by an actor or actors to set the scene and situation, as in most other extant Greek tragedies. Instead, the play opens with the parodos in which the Persian elders come through the passageway (also called parodos) chanting in anapests, as if marching toward a public building (1. 141).⁴⁶ The poet's use of the chorus to introduce this play emphasizes the communal import of the plot. This will be no family tragedy from which the state suffers incidently; rather the fortune of all Persia is at issue, and the chorus represents all Persians, absent and at home.

The variety of rhythms used and the context in which they appear help to underline the change in Persian fortune.⁴⁷ The stately anapestic rhythms which open the play suggest public processionals and add dignity and authority to the old men and to the queen whom they greet reverently. This formal rhythm, which the chorus leader uses twice to address the queen, also stresses the distance between ruler and subject in the monarchy. (The same rhythm is used for a song to Zeus in lines 532-47.) The queen and Darius sometimes respond in trochaic tetrameter, a verse form used for formal dialogue. When the disaster is announced, the queen reveals by her silence her horror as well as her dignity.

But the chorus's opening song also contains ionic rhythms, suggestive of the more ecstatic religions of the East. And it is these rhythms that are picked up as the emotional tensions build and the Persians themselves begin to lose the dignity associated with their secure power and prosperity. The ode which follows the courier's bad news contains a greater variety of lyric rhythms punctuated by cries of pains—ee!, ōa!, pheu!. The next ode, the invocation of Darius, separated only by the queen's short speech and their shorter response, builds to a frenzy by means of repeated cries and even repeated words in rhythms associated with the most intense emotion (choriambics and dochmiacs as well as ionics). The chorus's movements probably expressed their frenzy as well; they may have beat the tomb or ground to arouse the dead king. Awestruck by his epiphany and certain of his divinity, they express their fear in ionics instead of the anapests they used for the queen. The predominance of the lyrics over the episodes in this middle section emphasizes their pain and dread. But their next ode, after Darius departs, provides an effective contrast with the preceding and following songs. Their praise of Darius's great deeds and temperate rule is composed of dactyls, a stately epic rhythm that places Darius firmly in an honorable past and thus increases our sense of the difference between then and now, between father and son.

Xerxes' pathetic appearance is matched by his verse. Unlike the other characters, he has no speech capable of expressing his suffering. He can only groan and lament in the lyric rhythms of the chorus. Together they sing their lamentations in the dirge form familiar to the spectators. The last two hundred lines are in effect a funeral procession in which the chorus and Xerxes, representative of all Persia, ruler and ruled, beat their breasts, pull their hair, and rend their robes, having lost everything—subjects, property, loved ones, even their own composure.

DICTION AND IMAGERY

Aeschylus selects words and images which increase tension and enhance his themes.⁴⁸ In Persians, for example, his uncommon diction combines with the costumes and rhythms to convey the majesty and remoteness of his characters. His Greek vocabulary includes unusual words such as heavy, sonorous compounds, neologisms, and rare expressions, and he even borrows words directly from the Persian language. He uses actual Persian names and introduces the royal personages by their formal Persian titles. Aeschylus also borrows epic words and formulae, such as catalogues and ornamental epithets to suggest the heroism of the characters and the mythic nature of the action. But his double-edged use of words conveys disapproval of oriental despotism and foreshadows disaster. While the chorus pronounces its litany of royal Persian titles, it kneels before the queen in a humble adoration that the Greeks would have rejected (11. 155-7). In addition, Aeschylus puns on the similarity between the name “Persia” and the Greek word for “destroy” (persai, 1. 178). And the epithets which added majesty decrease and disappear once the defeat has been reported.⁴⁹

Similarly, Aeschylus's imagery traces the action and illuminates the themes implicit in the play.⁵⁰Persians develops several related image patterns simultaneously to underline the reversal in fortune and to suggest the arrogance and excess which brought about the disaster. The proud descriptions of the Persian expedition—the “gold-laden” armament, the mass of marching soldiers, the sport of hunting or fishing, the strength of the sea, and the bridge or yoke joining Asia to Greece—change their meanings once the defeat is reported. Aeschylus also inserts funeral images into the parodos and then increases their frequency until the pattern culminates (in the exodus) in the literal singing of the dirge, which symbolizes the death of Persian prosperity.

The expedition sets out as a glorious troop of orderly men. But the early frequency of the word “gold” (and related words such as “delicate” or “luxurious”) forces us to recognize Persian prosperity as prideful extravagance. The contrast between the golden armament and the “black-robed heart” develops into a general contrast between radiance and gloom, or dawn and night, as the imagined mourning becomes a reality.

The description in the parodos also creates a vivid image of the infantry as a close-packed troop of men marching in step.⁵¹ The picture of their heavy feet beating the land is fraught with danger, however, for the queen foresees that “great wealth, raising a cloud of dust, will overturn prosperity with its foot” (1. 163). The messenger's account of the retreat describes a literal fall; instead of a body of strong men on foot, the infantry is now made up of stragglers falling over one another (1. 506). The change in posture symbolizes the decline in power as well as order. In the end, Xerxes has lost the strength of his limbs (1. 913) and Asia has been brought to her knees (1. 930).

Images of hunting and fishing also underline the theme of the fall from fortune. The chorus refers to the net of ruin (1. 95) that will engulf the Greeks.⁵² The queen confirms the assurance that the Greeks are the unfortunate prey when she asks why her son desired to “hunt down” Athens (1. 233). But the hunters are the ones who are trapped; the courier describes them as “tunnies or a catch of fish in the sea” (1. 424). The change in the image underlines the reversal and reinforces our sense of the inevitability of divine Ruin (Atē, who spreads her net).

The sea itself, the site of the Persian disaster at Salamis, provides one of the primary images of arrogance and reversal.⁵³ In the parodos, the armament is depicted as a flood of men, an irresistible wave of the sea (11. 89-90), but the sea can change, as Aeschylus implies in a neologism that describes how the wind turns the sea gray (1. 110). And after the messenger has given a factual account of the naval defeat, the queen describes the news as a “sea of evils” that overwhelms the Persians (1. 433), and Darius calls it a “fountain of disasters” (1. 743). Ghastly images of the dead bobbing in the water, dashing against the shore, or nibbled at by the fish portray the sea as the instrument of the disaster. As Darius makes clear, the Hellespont is sacred, the Bosphorus the holy stream, and Poseidon a god not to be overpowered (11. 745, 746, 750). Moreover the courier and men believe that the gods directly intervened in the retreat, raising up untimely winter and freezing the flow of the holy Strymon (11. 495-96). Again the image reinforces a judgment; despite its strength and self-confidence, the Persian expedition was not equal to the divine sea.

The yoke and bridge, the most important complex of images, embrace all these other pictures.⁵⁴ To get to Greece, Xerxes had to bridge the Hellespont, the body of water which separates it from Asia. His bridge connecting the two continents is described as a yoke by the chorus (11. 65-72, 126-32) and by his mother (11. 722, 736). But the yoke, like the net, conveys the idea of capture and enslavement because of its use in keeping animals in their traces. In fact, the word first appears in line 50, where Xerxes' troops hasten to cast “the yoke of slavery around Hellas.” In similar words, Xerxes is described as having cast his yoke around the neck of the sea (1. 72). Thus the political and metaphysical ambitions are related; Darius judges this bridge the height of his son's folly:

…, by youthful pride; who hoped
To check the sacred waters of the Hellespont
By chains, just as if it were a slave. He smoothed
His way, yoking Neptune's flowing Bosphorus
With hammered shackles. Mortal though he was,
By folly thought to conquer all the gods
And Neptune …

(11. 746-50; Benardete, trans.)

The image is directly connected to the action. In the queen's dream, Xerxes' failure to enslave Greece is foreshadowed by the Greek sister's refusal to submit to the yoke. Significantly, he is thrown down by her violent resistance. Like the others, the yoke image in the end redounds on the Persians. The young widow is left alone in her marriage yoke (11. 139, 542), the Persian yoke of strength over Asia will be loosened (1. 594), and the bridge that yoked two into one (1. 131) becomes Xerxes' escape route after his ignominious defeat (1. 736). This pattern, developed in relation to the others in the play, aptly illustrates Earp's assessment that “Aeschylus does his serious thinking in images. He creates pictures to convey difficult ideas vividly and boldly.”⁵⁵ The intertwining of the pictures and their relation to the concrete details of the plot express the complex relationship among the ideas, desires, and events.

Moreover, the blending of actual dirges with ubiquitous images of lamentation engulfs the entire action of Persians in an atmosphere of mourning which foreshadows the sense of total destruction at the end.⁵⁶ In the first line of the play, the chorus refers to the absent warriors with an ambiguous word which also means “dead and gone.” Then they interrupt their description of the golden armament to express their anxiety in the vivid imagery of the dirge. They see their minds as “black-robed” and “rent” and anticipate the cries of the Cissian women's antiphonal wails (11. 115-25). Words referring to the sounds and gestures of wailing punctuate the dialogue as the courier, the chorus, the queen, and Darius discuss the defeat at Salamis and the disastrous flight. Xerxes, watching at Salamis, “shrieked” (1. 465), “tore his robes and screamed out a shrill cry” (1. 468). In response to the report, the chorus first imagines the Persian women's almost soundless sobbing as they tear their veils, and then cries out their own very real lament. When they join their dirge to Xerxes', the antiphonal wailing, long anticipated by words and images, builds to a crescendo which dramatizes their ineluctable grief.

PERSIAN TRAGEDY AND UNIVERSAL CONDITION

Xerxes is the first hero in Greek tragedy. His fall from high fortune to low illustrates that universal rhythm in human life that Aristotle later defined as an essential element in the genre. Aeschylus is more interested in the pattern than the man. He emphasizes the fact that Xerxes is the ruler of a mighty nation at the height of its prosperity and strength. Its lust for even more wealth and power has attracted the envy and anger of the gods. In the words of the queen and Darius, both majestic representatives of Persia's more prudent past, the nation had achieved a glorious and god-granted prosperity (olbos) which Xerxes in his pride (hubris) and lust after wealth (ploutos) destroyed, for he became infatuated (atē) and tried to accomplish more than any human should (the yoking of Greece to his rule of Asia and the yoking of the sea). As a consequence, he brought divine Ruin (Atē) upon himself and his nation, and all the characters condemn his rashness (thrasos).

The extent of Xerxes' fall from fortune is dramatized by the contrast between the ruler described as the leader of the expedition and the ruler we see before us at the end. He is first introduced to us by the chorus with his impressive formal titles: Lord Xerxes, King, Son of Darius (1. 5), as a “furious lord of populous Asia” (1. 74), a “godlike man” (1. 80), an “Ares who conquers with the bow” (1. 85). We are prepared gradually for the change in his situation by the courier's report, and by the reactions of his parents, who, because of their dreams, portents, and prophecies, seem to have a closer relationship to the gods than the “godlike man” of the parodos. But the actual appearance of Xerxes, stripped of everything, ragged, weak-kneed, and wailing, must shock us. We fully understand the extent of his fall and the limitations of his humanity.

We cannot place all the blame on Xerxes, however. As ruler he embodies all Persia's pride in its power and prosperity. And so the chorus which boasts of the expedition, glories in Darius's conquests, and laments the loss of the empire must share the responsibility for the defeat. The chorus represents the condition of the Persian people, themselves enslaved but identifying with their ruler's lust for power over other nations. Too late they (and the queen) recognize the divine response and become appropriately humble.

But Aeschylus makes it possible to pity the defeated enemy for several reasons. In the first place, despite certain implicit political and moral judgments, the Persians are presented as sensitive, noble men of heroic proportions. They deserve our sympathy from the beginning and gain more respect when they acquiesce in the justice of their punishment. Although they are trapped by their own failures, we recognize with horror that the gods have also stalked them, leading them toward the ruin which is the natural consequence of their own folly. Although no one doubts Xerxes' responsibility, all the characters see a god's hand in every stage of the unexpected defeat and disastrous withdrawal. Darius summarizes the moral of the divine/human relationship: “Whenever someone presses on, the gods join with him” (1. 742).

If the reversal of Persian fortune demonstrates the weakness of the mighty when they oppose divine will, the Athenians cannot rest secure in the assumption that their own actions are independent of this universal pattern of reward and punishment. In fact, Darius warns that the pattern is eternal, that the particular defeat at Plataea will be but one more example of a universal moral order. He exhorts future generations to learn from the event that they must curb their own propensity to “think more than mortal thoughts” (1. 819). Athens had just begun to reap the benefits of the Persian disaster and was building its own store of prosperity, as leader of the Delian League. Therefore, Darius's words to his former subjects apply directly to the spectators.

The empathy between the Athenian audience and the Persian characters goes beyond the moral lesson, however. The ordinary citizen might not recognize his own greed and ambition in the actions of the mighty ruler, but the chorus provides the bridge through which he participates in the suffering. Although the Persian elders are loyal and can offer good advice, they are not as close to the gods as the rulers and are more apprehensive of the future. Their lyrical songs of pain imitate the audience's own modes of grieving, and they pray as the Athenians pray. The chorus conveys what the ordinary citizen suffers when the nation marches off to war: the anxiety of parents for their sons, and the grief of brides who must mourn lost mates.

But even the mighty rulers reenact a personal tragedy that lies beneath the political and moral one. The royal family itself exemplifies the family per se and the three characters exhibit concerns and conflicts inherent in relationships among father, son, and mother/wife.⁵⁷ The care of the parents for each other and their child is immediately obvious. Both seem to fear for the continuation of the dynasty as well. The prudence of the older generation is dramatized in the royal couple's dignified appearance and acceptance of their suffering. In addition, Darius's careful language, so full of aphorisms and self-confident judgments, confirms his superiority. Darius twice ascribes Xerxes' rashness to his youth and inexperience (11. 741, 782). In comparison to the mature adults around him, Xerxes, the tearful son, can only seem puerile.

But the queen offers a further explanation for Xerxes' rash act: he was taunted by his associates for being a lesser man than his father. Xerxes' invasion of Greece in response to this reproach suggests his desire to outdo his father, or, in the Freudian terms of modern psychoanalytic critics, his oedipal rivalry with him.⁵⁸ To them, the queen, who reveals this information, seems herself to have an ambivalent attitude toward her son, alternately praising his ambitious quest for manhood and blaming his inadequacy or mothering him with clean clothes and comfort. The overt meaning of her dream is very clear; Xerxes will fail to conquer Greece. There are sexual overtones, however, in his attempt to yoke the two women/horses.⁵⁹ The mother splits herself into two sisters who quarrel because she desires her son and represses that desire by rebuking and censuring him. The political application suggests the mother's additional conflict between ambition for and jealousy of her son's possible success.⁶⁰ The son, in turn, wants to yoke (or marry) his father's woman (or land), in other words, to replace his father as a ruler and lover. When the Xerxes of the dream is thrown to the ground, the sight of Darius looking on causes him to rend his garments, presumably in humiliation. Darius, in dream and episode, is so strong and wise that Xerxes appears to be no serious threat. However far one wants to take the psychoanalytic interpretation, the universal tension of the parent/child relationship is part of the drama, and Xerxes, the son who fails to define himself within it, suffers his own private tragedy.

Thus, the spectators at Persians could watch the performance and feel pity and fear for the characters as their apprehensions become a reality, and at the same time see a relation between the suffering of the mighty and their own needs and ambitions. If what they view is painful in itself, what they gain is, in Aristotle's words, the “pleasure peculiar to tragedy.”⁶¹ Their guilty fear that too much of a good thing is dangerous, their omnipresent awareness of the likelihood of failure, and their subconscious strivings for independence are all validated by the dramatization of this particular story. When the universal pattern of reward and punishment is once again confirmed, the individual also achieves insight into the human condition. To Aeschylus, this insight is grounds for optimism, for it confirms the existence of a providential moral order. The punishment of the Persians is harsh but just, wisdom has come from their suffering, and, with god's help, a more prudent Hellas has emerged victorious.

Notes

1. Pausanias, Descriptions of Greece, ed. W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod (London: G. P. Putnam, 1926), book 1, chapter 14.5. The epitaph is quoted in the ancient Life of Aeschylus, which was included in the Medicean manuscript and appears at the end of the Greek text edited by Denys Page, Aeschyli septem quae supersunt tragoediae, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1972), hereafter cited as OCT.

2. For the poet's biography, see the Life cited above. Ancient biographies generally provide little reliable information, however, because the biographers included all sorts of legendary and anecdotal material without attempting to verify or criticize the tradition. See also Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Tragedy, tr. James Willis and Cornelius de Heer (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 240-41, as well as Pauly-Wissova et al., Real Encyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1894). For further information on Aeschylus's time in Sicily, see C. J. Herington, “Aeschylus in Sicily,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 87 (1967):74-85.

3. … For the most complete presentations of the questions involved, see A. F. Garvie, Aeschylus' “Supplices”: Play and Trilogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), and Mark Giffith, The Authenticity of “Prometheus Bound” (Cambridge, 1977).

4. See N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C., 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), for a detailed history of the period.

5. Herodotus, The Histories, tr. Aubrey de Selincourt (Baltimore: Penguin, 1954), book 5, chapter 78, p. 339. All following citations from Herodotus will refer to this edition …

6. Gerald Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965) and Gilbert Murray, Aeschylus, The Creator of Tragedy (Oxford, 1940).

7. For summaries of the evidence and evaluations of the various theories, see Else, Origin, and Albin Lesky, Greek Tragedy, tr. H. A. Frankfort (London, 1965), pp. 26-46; Lesky, History, pp. 223-40; and Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy, and Comedy, 2d ed., rev. T. B. L. Webster (Oxford, 1962). But Oliver Taplin, in Greek Tragedy in Action (London, 1978), pp. 23, 164-65, argues that the origins of tragedy, and particularly its relation to early religious rites, are irrelevant to our understanding of its essence in the fifth century.

8. E. R. Dodds, Euripides' “Bacchae” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), p. xviii, contains a good discussion of the character and worship of Dionysus. The works cited in notes 6 and 7 also examine the god's relation to tragedy.

9. K. G. Kachler, “Über Wesen and Wirkin der Theatermaske,” Antaios 11 (1969): 192-208.

10. For a detailed account of all aspects, with the ancient sources, see Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2d ed., rev. John Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford, 1968).

11. For a concise introduction to Greek meter and further bibliography on lyric in tragedy, see James W. Halporn, Martin Ostwald, and Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Meters of Greek and Latin Poetry, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978). Two Greek rhythms used for dialogue, iambic trimeter and trochaic tetrameter, correspond to the English stichic verses. The lyric meters have no real English equivalent, however. They are made up of metrical phrases called cola, which consist of irregular alternations of long and short syllables that cannot be divided into smaller units. (In quantitative languages like Greek, long and short syllables are comparable to the stress and unstress of accentual verse.) There are many kinds of cola, with different lengths and movements, and they do not repeat themselves line after line like English stichic verse. Rather they occur in an infinite variety of combinations with other phrases to form unique lyric stanzas which are often paired and repeated exactly (strophe and antistrophe). Many of the ancient terms connected with lyric such as “strophe,” which literally means “turn,” indicate a close relationship between its development and that of dance. In fact, the word “chorus” itself means “a group dance performed in a set formation.” For information on the origin of dance and its relation to lyric, see J. W. Fitton, “Greek Dance,” Classical Quarterly 23 (1973):254-74.

12. Else discusses the importance of familiar lyric forms in “Ritual and Drama in Aeschylean Tragedy,” Illinois Classical Studies 11 (1977):70-87. H. D. Broadhead, “The Persae” of Aeschylus (Cambridge, 1960), appendix 4, pp. 310-17, contains an analysis of these lyric forms.

13. See Else, Origin, and Lesky, History, for discussions of the theories. Else emphasizes the importance of the rhapsodes and early lyric poets to the development of the episodes.

14. Else, Origin, p. 76.

15. The following books discuss the various aspects of the theater and production: Peter Arnott, Greek Scenic Conventions in the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford, 1962), and The Ancient Greek and Roman Theater (New York: Random House, 1971); Margaret Bieber, History of the Greek and Roman Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939); Taplin, Greek Tragedy; T. B. L. Webster, Greek Theater Production (London: Methuen, 1956). The article by N. G. L. Hammond, “The Conditions of Dramatic Production to the Death of Aeschylus,” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 13 (1972):387-450, and Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: Dramatic Use of Entrances and Exits in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 1977), are especially valuable for study of the early theater and Aeschylus's production devices.

16. For a discussion of structural divisions, see Aristotle, Poetics, 1452 b, 14-27, and the comments by Taplin, Stagecraft, pp. 49-60, 470-76.

17. See Oliver Taplin, “Aeschylean Silences and Silences in Aeschylus,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 76 (1972):89-94, as well as his Greek Tragedy, pp. 101-21, for an examination of Aeschylus's use of the silent actor.

18. Arnott, Ancient Greek, p. 44. See also Kachler, “Über Wesen,” and Peter Walcot, Greek Drama in Its Theatrical and Social Context (Cardiff, Wales, 1976) pp. 57-58.

19. See Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals, pp. 177-209, as well as Iris Brooke, Costume in Classic Greek Drama (New York, 1962).

20. Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals, pp. 126-76, as well as Taplin, Greek Tragedy, pp. 58-76, and F. L. Shisler, “The Use of Stage Business to Portray Emotion in Greek Tragedy,” American Journal of Philology 66 (1945):377-97. Walcot, Greek Drama, pp. 64-66, relates acting style to the mode of delivery practiced by rhapsodes and orators. Zoja Pavelonskis, “The Voice of the Actor in Greek Tragedy,” Classical Weekly 71 (1977):113-24, considers the possible effect of the same actor playing several roles.

21. Walcot, Greek Drama, p. 67, and Taplin, Greek Tragedy, pp. 58-76.

22. See the chapter on the chorus in Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals, pp. 232-62. The author argues against the theory that Aeschylus's early plays contained fifty chorus members, pp. 234-35.

23. See L. B. Lawler, The Dance in Ancient Greece (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1965), as well as Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals, pp. 246-57, and Fitton, “Greek Dance.”

24. It is difficult to determine how much scenery or stage business the Greek audience expected. See Taplin's introduction to Stagecraft for a statement of the problems and the principles he has evolved for deciding what the production consisted of. Arnott, Conventions, and Walcot, Greek Drama, also consider this problem.

25. See Arnott, Conventions, Taplin, Greek Tragedy, and David Bain's preface to his Actors and Audience: A Study of Asides and Related Conventions in Greek Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 1-17, for an analysis of these conventions and their use in specific plays.

26. See Bain's article “Audience Address in Greek Tragedy,” Classical Quarterly 25 (1975): 13-25, as well as his Actors, and Taplin, Greek Tragedy, pp. 165-66.

27. See Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals, pp. 263-78, as well as Walcot's Greek Drama and his article “Aristophanic and Other Audiences,” Greece and Rome 18 (1971):35-50.

28. For information on Aristotle's opinion, see D. W. Lucas, “Poetics” of Aristotle: Introduction, Commentary and Appendices (Oxford, 1968). Taplin, Greek Tragedy, pp. 167-69; and Thomas Rosenmeyer, “Gorgias, Aeschylus, and Apatē,” American Journal of Philology 76 (1955):225-60, discuss the ideas of Gorgias. For an excellent presentation of the essential elements of tragedy and the audience's response, see R. B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, Versions of Experience (Seattle, 1968).

29. Taplin, Greek Tragedy, p. 168.

30. Ibid., pp. 169-70.

31. See Broadhead, “The Persae,” pp. 1v-1x, for a discussion of possible thematic connections between the four plays. For this [essay], I have consulted the text and commentary of Broadhead; Page's OCT; Herbert J. Rose, A Commentary on the Surviving Plays of Aeschylus, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1958); and Anthony J. Podlecki, “The Persians” by Aeschylus, a Translation with Commentary, Prentice-Hall Greek Drama Series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970).

32. See Podlecki, Persians, as well as his The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann Arbor, 1966), chapter 2 and appendix A, for a discussion of Aeschylus's treatment of Salamis and the Persian rulers. Harry C. Avery, “Dramatic Devices in Aeschylus' Persians,” American Journal of Philology 85 (1964): 173-84, analyzes the diction by which the poet makes Salamis represent the whole war.

33. Podlecki also speculates that these lines refer to Themistocles' attempts to get the Ionians to rebel against the Persians at Salamis. See his notes on these lines and line 42 as well as Political Background, pp. 17-21, for a discussion of the significance of the Ionian references.

34. The translation is by Seth Benardete and appears in Modern Library Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus II (New York, n.d.).

35. See Podlecki, Political Background, chapter 2, for arguments and bibliography.

36. For Themistocles' career, see Podlecki, The Life of Themistocles (Montreal: Queen's University Press, 1975), and Robert Lenardon, The Saga of Themistocles (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978). Lenardon, pp. 121-25, disagrees with Podlecki's assessment of Aeschylus as a propagandist for Themistocles.

37. Taplin, Stagecraft, pp. 124-27.

38. Barbara H. Fowler, “Aeschylus' Imagery,” Classica et Mediaevalia 28 (1967): 1-3.

39. See Taplin, Stagecraft, pp. 39-49 and appendix F, for a discussion of the evidence for the judgment of Aeschylus's use of spectacle.

40. Ibid., p. 115.

41. Ibid., pp. 115-19, and Broadhead, “The Persae,” p. 309.

42. Brooke, Costume, p. 99; Taplin, Stagecraft; Podlecki, Persians; and Avery, “Dramatic Devices,” discuss the costumes and the attention paid to Xerxes' garments.

43. Taplin, Stagecraft, analyzes the contrast between entrances to show that Aeschylus did not use spectacle for its own sake.

44. Ibid., p. 99.

45. Ibid., pp. 121-23. Taplin discusses the possible visual presentations.

46. The scene is loosely defined first as “this ancient abode” and later as Darius's tomb. The absence of a facade demanding definition probably accounts for the vagueness of the setting. See Taplin, Stagecraft, pp. 103-7, and Broadhead, “The Persae,” xliii-xlvi.

47. For detailed analysis, see Broadhead, appendix, on meter, pp. 283-301.

48. Both F. E. Earp, The Style of Aeschylus (Cambridge, 1948), and W. B. Stanford, Aeschylus in His Style: A Study in Personality (Dublin, 1942), present excellent discussions of features of Aeschylean style and diction, using examples from Persians in many sections, especially to illustrate foreign words and allusions to epic. Broadhead, “The Persae,” discusses the use of Persian names in his appendix, pp. 318-21.

49. Earp, Style, p. 55.

50. Ibid., pp. 95-113, 173-75, for a good general discussion of Aeschylus's use of metaphor and image, as well as Fowler, “Aeschylus' Imagery,” pp. 1-10.

51. Fowler, “Aeschylus' Imagery,” pp. 6-7, discusses the images of trampling and falling. Avery, “Dramatic Devices,” analyzes the way Aeschylus uses words to stress multitude and wealth (174-77).

52. Fowler, “Aeschylus' Imagery,” pp. 5-6.

53. See the commentaries of Broadhead and Podlecki for the development of imagery connected with the sea.

54. Jean Dumortier, Les Images dans la poesie d'Eschyle (Paris, 1933), pp. 12-26, and Fowler, “Aeschylus' Imagery,” pp. 1-10, analyze this image in detail. Fowler shows how it is related to the image of balance, where weight (and mass connected to trampling) is equated with misfortune, and where Zeus weighs men's fortunes on a scale that resembles a yoke.

55. Earp, Style, p. 173.

56. J. A. Haldane, “Musical Themes and Imagery in Aeschylus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 85 (1965): 35.

57. Podlecki, Persians, pp. 12-13, discusses the tragedy as a “family affair.”

58. Richard S. Caldwell, “The Pattern of Aeschylean Tragedy,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 101 (1970): 78-83.

59. See George Devereux, Dreams in Greek Tragedy: An Ethnopsychoanalytic Study (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 1-20, for a detailed analysis of the dream.

60. Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), examines the frustrations of women in Greek society and their effects on Greek sons, in life and myth. Caldwell and Devereux both cite Slater in their works.

61. Aristotle, Poetics, 1453 a.