The Persians by Aeschylus - soon new disaster gushes forth

That little tag (l. 814, p. 145) about disaster could be from many Greek tragedies, but it is specifically from The Persians by Aeschylus (472 BCE), his first extant play, and therefore the first extant Greek play, and therefore the first extant play, which amazes me every time I think about it.

The Persians is likely not the first in many other ways, although as with any aspect of this subject, who knows, but it is pretty close.  The cult of Dionysus had only been in Athens for a hundred years or so, and the interactions between a chorus and a single actor performing some kind of dramatic story (meaning, a play) younger than that.  The Theater of Dionysus had only been in use for about twenty-five years, which is likely about how long Aeschylus had been writing and directing plays.  Greek tragedy was already a mature theatrical tradition when Aeschylus wrote The Persians, with a number of older playwrights, experiments, and so many lost plays.

Side note: my plan is to write about various aspects of Greek plays as I write about specific ones.  I won’t say anything you won’t read in the introductory material to whichever editions you are reading, but it is all part of how I organize my thoughts about the plays, and about literature generally.  Why did anyone write this kind of thing?  Who was the audience?  What did the performance of the play look like?  How did it sound?  Basic stuff.

How many Greek tragedies were directly* about recent events, for example?  The Persians is the only example we have.  It is the tragedy of Xerxes, king of Persia, specifically his decisive defeat by a much smaller force of Greeks, primarily Athenian, in the naval battle of Salamis just eight years before the performance of the play.  It’s the victory that kicked off the Athenian Golden Age and created the power vacuum in the Aegean that led to an empire run by a democratic government of a once-minor city-state.  Unlikely events.

My understanding of human nature suggests that a play or epic poem or song about a great victory would be celebratory, perhaps even boastful, but this play is about the suffering of the Persians in defeat, and not of ordinary people but of the Emperor:

XERXES: Weep and howl.

CHORUS:  We weep and howl. (ll. 1060-1, p. 151)

The great showpiece scene features a messenger giving a long description of the battle, the great defeat, and the subsequent disastrous retreat, while the mother of Xerxes and the Persian elders react in horror and grief.  “Yet I must now unfold the whole disastrous truth” (l. 53, 130), the messenger says:

Sirs, I was there; what I have told I saw myself;

I can recount each detail of the great defeat.  (ll. 63-4, 151)

And what gets me is that a large part of the audience, and the actors, and likely the playwright, the 15,000 free male citizens of Athens, were also there, at Salamis, or adjunct to it, and many others had fought in other battles against the Persians.  Even the youngest would remember the events, only eight years before, when a massive Persian force was on the edge of conquering Athens.  Obviously, the tragedy of the Persians is the negative image of the triumph of the Athenians, but The Persians appears more like a radical act of sympathy.  “Why is the groaning earth rutted and scarred” (l. 71, p. 141) asks the ghost of King Darius, a universal question, perhaps, or at least a good one for the rulers of a new empire to ask.

Or I am misreading the tone completely, and The Persians is about gloating and humiliating the justly punished enemies of God-favored Athens.

I read the Philip Vellacott translation in the old Penguin Classics edition, so line and page numbers come from there.

Next up is Seven Against Thebes (467 BCE), the third play in an otherwise lost trilogy about Oedipus and Thebes.  I’m going to switch to the Anthony Hecht and Helen H. Bacon translation because the edition has more notes, and boy does this play need them. While The Persians is a great place to kick off a trip through the Greek plays, Seven Against Thebes is a poor follow-up, in that it is likely the most arcane, alien play we will read.  Who was the audience; what did it look like – I will need these questions more than ever.

I hope everyone enjoyed The Persians.  It is awfully interesting.

The vase, roughly contemporary to The Persians, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It shows Athena holding the stern of a warship, and likely commemorates an Athenian naval victory.

* A number of later plays are indirectly about recent events, but we’ll get to that.