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What we know of Aeschylus's life--and, as
said before, much of what we know about
these tragedians' lives has not come to us
in any intact, well-preserved biography, but
through careful detective work by scholars
like Wilamowitz--intertwined beautifully
with the history of the Greek drama of
which he was so crucial a part.
Aeschylus was from the town of Eleusis,
home of the famous Mysteries that were
the center of Greek occult and esoteric
religion. There were fertility rites which
initiated celebrants into worship of
Demeter, the earth goddess, whose lossand retrieval of her daughter Persephone
was a metaphor for the cycles of natural
decline and renewal. Thus, in his
background, Aeschylus possessed the
proximity TO ritual and worship that
characterized early Greek drama.Aeschylus is often pictured as a sober
stalwart, a bastion of civic responsibility;
and he certainly was this, in his maturity
he was a publicly minded Athenian active
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in his city's wars against the invading
Persian Empire. But caricatures of his
personality (some admittedly done by near-
contemporaries such as Aristophanes)
sometimes make him seem the Greek
equivalent of the Roman Cato the Censor:
an abstemious custodian of the old days.
Aeschylus was more of a 'Dionysian' guy
than we think, and not only because he
many times won the annual Dionysian
competition in Athens, This was the major
competition for new plays; ancient Greek
dramatic culture was rather like todays
novelistic culture, with the overwhelming
importance of the Booker Prize, national
Book Award, et cetera; and, in turn, there
was a common prize-orientedness'
between the drama and athletic
competition s like the Olympic games; this
connection between sporting and poetical
achievement had already been made by the
lyric poet Pindar, father of the ode.
Aeschylus came to drama only in mid-
career after establishing his public
reputation. We may conclude that his life
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experience helped enrich his aesthetic
approach so that, in his work, European
drama received its initiation in the hands of
someone well practiced in ritual, war, and
civic affairs.
Aeschylus most likely was an actor in his
own early plays, and it is interesting tothink of him as an 'actor' in two senses, in
other words, that his military and political
career also involved acting, playing a role
before the public, even if there was no
feigning or adoption of another character
involved. This is also interesting in that, bythe end of the ancient world, acting had
become virtually coextensive with
effeminacy (I guess on the hypothesis that
being an actor liberated the effeminate
man to 'act like a woman'), and yet
Aeschylus--who more or less invented theactor as we know it, the actor who
engages with another actor on-stage, by
introducing the second actor and having
drama replace and augment and
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interspersed series of choral odes--was an
unquestionably macho figure. Incidentally,
the idea of an actor is supposed to have
been invented by Thespis, a previous
tragedian--hence the adjective 'thespian'
for actor).
Aeschylus's immersion in ritual and
ceremony show up directly in his plays.Aside from THE PERSIANS, the one
remaining drama we have by him on
contemporary issues, his civic and military
career does not. However one of the
paradoxes we have to take into account
hewn discussing Athenian drama is that,just because it did not represent
contemporary political events on stage,
this does not mean it was not informed by
those events. Not only do representations
of war, politics, and social conflict in the
plays inevitably feed off what thecontemporary audience would have been
thinking about in those respects at the
time, but, as scholars such as G W F Hegel
and Werner Jaeger have noted, the
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confidence and the sense of civil education
these plays conveyed could not have arisen
from a society that was not as newly
wealthy, powerful, and, after its role in
fending off Persia, proud of itself as Athens
was.
We see Aeschylus as " Mr. Oresteia" and
not read the other plays so much. We alsotend to forget that, as with Sophocles, we
possess a very small fragment of the entire
oeuvre. Aeschylus tended to write in
trilogies, and some of his remaining plays,
like THE SUPPLIANTS (the first of the
'Danaid trilogy', or SEVEN Against Thebes,the last of the Oedipus trilogy'. We see
Sophocles writing Electra, which is extent,
and think he is 'poaching on Aeschyluss
turf. Yet Aeschylus also wrote an Oedipus
trilogy, like Sophocles, of which only the
last play, seven against Thebes. survives.(Aeschylus, though. importantly, did not
write an Antigone). Though ideas of justice
and civic duty are important in the
Oresteia. We should not extrapolate from
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this and mount them as Aeschyluss
unyielding credo. We do not; as it were
know his work well enough for that, and
barring dramatic archaeological discoveries we
never will.