Playwright, known as the founder of Greek tragedy, born in Eleusis, near Athens, Greece. He served in the Athenian army in the Persian Wars, and was wounded at Marathon (490). The first and gravest of the great dramatists (winning the victory in 485 BC), he increased the number of characters in the action and introduced new staging. He won 13 first prizes in tragic competitions, before being defeated by Sophocles in 468. This may have induced him to leave Athens and go to Sicily. Out of some 60 plays ascribed to him, only seven are extant: Persians (472), Seven against Thebes (467), Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, and the trilogy of the Oresteia (458), three plays on the fate of Orestes, comprising Agamemnon (perhaps the greatest Greek play that has survived), Choephoroe, and Eumenides. Aeschylus' pivotal contribution to the structure of Greek tragedy was the introduction of a second actor, where there had previously been only one actor and the chorus, and the subordination of the chorus to the dialogue of the actors.
For other uses, see Aeschylus (disambiguation).
Aeschylus (525 BC—456 BC; He is the earliest of the three Greek tragedians whose plays are not entirely lost, the others being Sophocles and Euripides. He wrote his first plays in 498
BC. His earliest surviving play is probably The Persians, performed in 472 BC. In 490 BC, he participated in the Battle of Marathon and in 480 BC he fought at the Battle of Salamis,
which was to become the subject of The Persians. it is now generally accepted that The Suppliants was written in the last decade of his life, making The Persians his
earliest play and not The Suppliants as previously supposed. according to traditional legend, Aeschylus was killed in 456 BC when an eagle (or more likely a Lammergeier) dropped a live
and apparently very savage tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a stone. It read:
- - :This tomb the dust of Aeschylus doth hide,
- :Euphorion's son and fruitful Gela's pride
- :How tried his valor, Marathon may tell
- :And long-haired
Medes, who knew it all too well - - In Greek:
- - Αἰσχύλον Εὐφορίωνος Ἀθηναῖον τόδε κεύθει
- :μνῆμα καταφθίμενον πυροφόροιο Γέλας·
- ἀλκὴν δ’ εὐδόκιμον Μαραθώνιον ἄλσος ἂν εἴποι
- :καὶ βαρυχαιτήεις Μῆδος ἐπιστάμενος. - - - (Anthologiae Graecae Appendix, vol. 3, Epigramma sepulcrale 17)
Works
Aeschylus' work has a strong moral and religious emphasis, concentrating on man's position in the cosmos in relation to the gods, divine law and divine punishment in the Oresteia trilogy.
Aeschylus is known to have written about 76 plays, only 6 of which survive:
The Persians (472 BC) (Persai) Seven Against Thebes (467 BC) (Hepta epi Thebas) The Suppliants (463 BC?) (Hiketides) Oresteia (458 BC) Agamemnon The Libation Bearers (Choephoroi) The EumenidesIn addition, the existing canon of Aeschylus' plays includes a seventh, Prometheus Bound. its hostility to the figure of Zeus is completely at odds with the religious views of the other six plays. We know it must have been written before 429 BC, as Cratinus makes reference to this play in his own The Wealth Gods. Lost and fragmentary plays include Phineas, Glaukos Potnieus and Prometheus Pyrkaeus, a satyr play, belonging to the same tetralogy as The Persians; Laios, Oedipus and Sphynx, another satyr play, belonging to the same tetralogy as Seven Against Thebes; Proteus, the satyr play belonging to the Oresteia tetralogy;
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