Download - Aeschylus: An Introduction

7/30/2019 Aeschylus: An Introduction

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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.