I came for Prometheus Bound and stayed for The Persians and The Seven Against Thebes--but The Suppliant Maidens is the most sophisticated text here.

The Suppliant Maidens - a bizarre thing, with a choral protagonist, concerning an asylum claim of the Danaids: Greek drama was part of a self-flattering political dream wherein aliens always already desire to immigrate to Hellas against the wishes of nativists, which self-flattery continues in 2019 to be an abiding ideology in the United States and is accordingly one of the key foundational and self-defining mythologies of so-called western civilization. It gets to a weird start when the Egyptian speaker invokes Greek religion in the first line—is it masterful cosmopolitanism, or is it not rather a rigid xenophobia that can’t even imagine that strangers have their own ways? After the initial invocation of Zeus, the chorus seeks asylum whereupon the further invocation is made: “Who not in hell, Where another Zeus among the dead (they say) Works out their final punishment, can flee Their guilt of lust” (ll. 229-31). The imputation of Hellenic religion to xenos continues in “by race we claim Argos, the offspring of a fruitful cow” (l. 273-74), a reference to Io’s long journey.

Their petition: “to be no household-slave to Egyptus’ sons” (334). This, to the royal judge, is a “demand to wage / A new war” (341). The judge wants to avoid that “strife for us arise in unexpected and unpremeditated ways” (359). He regards it as outside his executive or judicial authority to decide, and considers it a legislative question: “But I make no promises until I share with all the citizens” (368-9), who at least have a consultative role, if not truly deliberative. The petitioners argue that “the land, the hearth [polis and oikos, NB] you rule / With the single vote and scepter” (372-3). In this dilemma, he fears “to act or not to act” (379), a moment of indecision. A concern for humanitarian intervention into the oikos of another in “a watchdog of men / Distressed who sit at neighboring hearths, / But obtain no lawful justice” (382-4). It is proposed that “Egytpus’ sons rule you by customs / Native to your city” (387-88), and they wish to escape it as a “heartless marriage” (394). The royal judge has difficulty with the issue, but insists on self-preservation: “So never may people say, if evil comes, / ‘Respecting aliens the city you destroyed’” (400-1).

The king is “run aground” (439) on the impasse of xenos v. polis, a matter of either course “necessity is strained” (440), hanged on ananke: “if consanguine / Blood is to stay unshed, we must sacrifice / To slaughter many kind to many gods” (448-49), he is “spent by this dispute” (450). “If I leave / This debt unpaid, you’ve warned of pollution / That shall strike unerringly” (471-3). He enjoins the father to place wreaths at “Altars of the native gods” so that “no one of the native people, who delight / In blame” might blame him (480 ff).

The chorus for its part thinks “mad is the race Egyptian, cursed, / In war unsated” (741-2); they are “wanton men, monstrous and profane” (763). The choral asylum claim runs through Io (524 ff.), who is construed at times as “bacchant of Hera” (565), “woman in turn, a monster marveled at” (570). The Egyptian advocate refers to the chorus as “you without city, I cannot respect” (852)—“willing, unwilling, you shall go” (861). The Egyptian position is standard imperialist: “I do not fear these gods before me” (893)—though the local royalty is not exactly enlightened: “You are / Barbarians, and you trifle insolently / With Greeks” (913-5): “you know not how to be a stranger” (918) as against “you speak unkindly to strangers” (927). The monarch adheres to the legislative will: “thus unanimous the vote / Decreed, never to surrender them to force” (941-2)—the city’s “voted will / Is now fulfilled” (963-4). Likely a trilogy focusing on the polis + demos > polis – demos; part II as themis – demos > polis + demos; part III is themis + demos > themis – demos? Dreadful, that they are lost.

The Persians

The introduction notes that “Aeschylus removes the Persian War to the realm of myth” here (45). The immediate concern is how “all Asia is gone: / To the city of Persians / Neither a herald not horseman returns” (13-5). The intention had been to “yoke / in servitude Hellas” (49-50)—a “destroyer of cities” (64) who is “yoking the neck of the sea” (71), the Persian monarch, from Herodotus VII, traces “his descent from Perseus” (79). The problem: “For divine fate has prevailed since / It enjoined Persians to wage wars” (102-3). It hangs in suspense until, foil to Marathon, “a Persian runner comes” (246) to report “all the barbarian host is gone” (254): “the sea-dyed corpses whirl / Vagrant on cragged shores” (277-8), “all aliens in a savage / Country, perished” (318-9). Even though the Persians allegedly outnumbered the Greeks, “some deity destroyed / Our host” (345-6): “she could not sate her appetite with those / Whom Marathon had made the Persians lose” (476-7). The result: “Now all Asia / Desolate, void” (548). “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” (584-90). What’s left but to “lavish on the nether gods” libations for the dead (621)?

An anti-katabasis, of course, wherein the queen summons spectral Darius “up from the dead” (631). He duly reports: “Ascent is not easy. The chthonic deities more readily / Receive than give” (688-9). Though he fears famine or “civil strife within the city” (715) (Agamben’s stasis), the complaint is that Xerxes “drained the plain manless” (718), a fantasy of demographics, then. She is concerned that “to the joyous bridge / They came, the yoke of continents” (735); his point is rather that “my son in ignorance / Discovered it, by youthful pride; who hoped / To check the sacred waters of the Hellespont / by chains, just as if it were a slave” (742-5). He recalls a lovely precession of Persian history (765 ff) before noting that “Grecian soil is their own ally” (791) insofar as “it starves to death excessive numbers” (793). Persia is punished: “so great will be / The sacrificial cake of clotted gore / Made at Plataea by Dorian spear” (816-17).

Seven Against Thebes

Part of the Oedipus story, this text focuses plainly on the stasis that occurs in the power vacuum after Oedipus is cast out: there is “disaster” throughout the polis (5), and the present archon orders his soldiers “fear not that mighty mob of foreigners” (34), a nexus of rightwing anxiety. His reconnaissance reports that the seven enemy divisions seek to “lay your city level / with the ground, sacked, or by their deaths to make /a bloody paste of this same soil of yours” (47-48). Thereafter, signs of the enemy are seen in a “cloud of dust” that their movements raise (60, 81), as well as in sounds thereof heard from outside (83, 100, 150)—though it gets borderline surreal with proclamations such as “I see the sound” (103); this is a similar pre-heralding, as in the Agamemnon. Archon repeats the order to participate in the defense of the polis: “Now if there is anyone that will not hear / my orders, be he man or woman or in between, / sentence of death shall be decreed against him / and public stoning he shall not escape” (196-9 emphasis added): never mind the perverse incentives generated by this injunction, what is going on with the gender politics there? Archon is the normal authoritarian in advocating that “obedience is the mother of success” (223). The choral position is that “thanks to the Gods that we have our city / unconquered” (233), but the archon produces, perhaps, a tragic dilemma in “I do not grudge your honoring the Gods. / But lest you make our citizens cowards, / be quiet and not overfearful” (236-8).

None of it matters insofar as the polis is genuinely subject to solicitation: “Our city groans from its foundation” (245)—is the dilemma aforesaid shaking the constitutional order, rooted in theological fear, which runs contrary to the orders of the polis executive? For his part, the executive despairs, “Alas, the luck which among human beings / conjoins an honest man with impious wretches” (597-8), which founders on the same dilemma, interpreted in a self-serving manner. He believes that “our race, the race of Oedipus, / by the gods maddened, by them greatly hated” (653-4), which is a reasonable point, considering that this is all the fallout of divine revenge against Oedipus for his ancestors’ defeat of ancient chthonian monsters. He appeals to a different dilemma: “I do not think that now he comes to outrage / this fatherland of his she will stand his ally/ or else she is called falsely Justice, joining with a man whose mind conceives no limit in villainy. / In this I trust and to the conflict with him / I’ll go myself. What other has more right? / King against king, and brother against brother” (669-675). The chorus recognizes the problem: “Forth from your house the black-robed Fury / shall go” (700); “Old is the tale of sin I tell / but swift in retribution: to the third generation it abides. / Thrice in Pythian prophecies / given at Navel-of-Earth / Apollo had directed / King Laius all issueless to die” (742 ff.). For Oedipus, the problem was not the patricide or the incest, but rather when “he knew the meaning of his dreadful marriage” (778-9). But “the decisions of Laius, / wanting in faith” (841) as the crime? Otherwise, a fantasy of demographics insofar as “emptied the city walls” (330) is plausible; Capaneus particularly desires to “burn the city” (434), as part of the slick catalog of enemies (375 et seq.); the descriptions of the Seven are lovely otherwise.

Prometheus Bound

Set at “the world’s limit” (1), an “untrodden desolation” (2), agents of the gods “nail this malefactor” (id.) to the cliff so that he might “pay the gods the penalty” for his “man-loving disposition” (3-4). The “command of Zeus” finds its “perfect fulfilment” in “Might and Violence” (12). The torture will proceed until Heracles liberates Prometheus, though during the play he “has yet to be born” (26). Hephaestus feels guilt, but is assured that “your craft is in no way the author of his present troubles” (47).

Fairly brutal: “drive the obstinate jaw of the adamantine wedge right through his breast” (64). The prosopopeia for Might intones, after nailing, that “the Gods named you wrongly when they called you Forethought” (88). Prometheus himself envisions “ten thousand years of time” of torment (95). He also sees a “limit to my sufferings” because “I have known all before, all that shall be” (99-100). His resume is slick: “It was mortal man / to whom I gave great privileges and / for that was yoked to this unyielding harness. / I hunted out the secret spring of fire, / that filled the narthex stem, which then revealed / became the teacher of each craft to men, / a great resource. This is the sin committed / for which I stand accountant” (106-13). At “earth’s end” (117), he finds that he is “enemy of Zeus, hated of all” (121)—aesthetics determined by power—arising out of his “excessive love for man” (123)—even his self-assessment is uncritical in accepting the distortions of power. He wishes instead that he had been thrown “underneath / the earth and underneath the House of Hades, host of the dead-- / yes, down to limitless Tartarus” (152-54), which would have been the more standard punishment for this sort of transgression.

What then accounts for the deviation from precedent? The chorus construes Zeus as he malignantly, / always cherishing a mind /that bends not, has subdued the breed of Uranos, not shall he cease / until he satisfies his heart” (163-5). Prometheus for his part predicts that “he shall need me” (168), at which time he will demand “recompense” (179). Zeus is savage and “his justice / a thing he keeps by his own standard” (188-9), which enables Russell’s critique of the moral argument for the existence of god—that the standard of justice is idiosyncratic to power, rather than derived from any particular set of axioms.

An apocalyptic prediction in that Zeus “shall melt to softness yet / when he is broken in the way I know” (190-1). Zeus is more concerned with how “he assigned / to the several gods their several privileges / and portioned out their power, but to the unhappy / breed of mankind he gave no heed, intending / to blot the race out and create a new” (231-5). Prometheus by contrast “rescued men from shattering destruction” (236) and acted in representative capacity: “I gave to mortal man a precedence over myself in pity” (240). He caused “mortals to cease foreseeing doom” (250) and “placed in them blind hopes” (252) and “gave them fire” (254); he also “first yoked beasts for them” so that “they might be man’s substitute” (462-4). He also taught them medicine, divination, religious practice, oneiromancy, augury, and so on (475 ff.): “all arts that mortals have came from Prometheus” (505). And yet: “craft [techne?] is far weaker than necessity [ananke?]” (513). This acting in representative capacity is also an intentional internalization of an externality: “I knew when I transgressed nor will I deny it. / in helping man I brought my troubles on me” (267-8). An apocalypse is foretold (368-74). A repeated refrain is how Zeus is a tyrant—and that general term of opprobrium is given some substance in the notion of a “tyrant’s private laws” (403).

Here is perhaps a dilemma: “Who then is the steersman of necessity?” “The triple-formed Fates and the remembering Furies.” “Is Zeus weaker than these?” “Yes, for he, too, cannot escape what is fated” “What is fated for Zeus besides eternal sovereignty?” “Inquire of this no further” (515-20). This must be compared to Roman Jupiter, who is perhaps superior to fate. Prometheus declines to let out the secret that he knows, the fate of Zeus, as “it is only by keeping it that I will escape my despiteful bondage and my agony” (524). Io shows up to “the limits of the world” (666), with tales of Zeus wanting to “blot out the whole race” (669), again construing humans as a writing. Prometheus tells Io that her suffering thus far is but a “prelude” (739). Io asks if Zeus will fall from power and he answers: “know that this shall be” (760) because of “a son mightier than his father” (768)—unless Prometheus is freed—and there is a recitation of the liberatory agent, a descendent of Io, “a man renowned / for archery” (870-1), anti-chthonian Heracles.

I bought this book because we were going to see a production of the Persians and wanted to be familiar with the story. I did like it a lot. This translation seemed really good, you could really hear the beauty and the despair of the ancient words. It was interesting reading a play that was how terrible things were for the enemey. Were the Greeks boasting or just showing compassion? I enjoyed the Persians immensly, a lot of woe, a strong woman queen, and a ghost! My favourite things! The next play Seven against thebes I also found interesting. I liked the juxtaposition between the women seeking religious help from the gods and the men keen on war. While it read a lot like a modern action movie (with descriptions of battles) it was interesting to see the gender differences and the way religon was portrayed, and like the first play, the language was gorgeous. The supplicants was also very interesting from a gender perspective, as the women petitioned the gods, and the town to save them from unwanted marriage. I can totally see why people would want to study these plays in detail, just reading through I felt like I was missing so much, but still getting exposed to so much history it was great. The last play Prometheus Unbound wasn't as much fun. The translator said how it was possibly not written by Aeschylus. I think the fact that there were so many more charcters seemed a bit weaker, and I missed the woes of the female chorus in the other play. But it was still good, just not as good as the first three. I think I've read three Greek playwrights so far, and this is definitely my favourite. I also highly recommend this translation.

The Persians and Other Plays is a collection of plays and commentary about plays by Aeschylus.

The book contains the following:
The Persians
Seven Against Thebes
The Suppliants
Prometheus Bound


Each play comes with a thorough introduction of the play itself as well as details of what we (think we) know about the history of the play's original performances and how they may have influenced other Classical plays and playwrights, references in which inevitably have been used to date the plays themselves.
This is followed by more commentary and notes on the plays and on related plays that may have existed.

For example, it appears from the commentary that it has long been unclear in what order Aeschylus wrote the plays:

The production of 472 is the only one by Aeschylus that is known to have consisted of four plays whose stories were, on the face of it, unrelated - indeed, they were not even placed in proper chronological order. The first play was Phineus, about an episode in the saga of the Argonauts. This was followed by The Persians; then, jumping back to the heroic age, by Glaucus of Potniae, about a man who subjected his horses to an unnatural training regime and was devoured by them after crashing in a chariot race; and then by a satyr play about Prometheus ("Prometheus the Fire-Bearer" or "Fire-Kindler"). Repeated efforts have been made to find method behind the apparent madness of this arrangement, so far with little success.

As entertaining as it is to imagine someone making a simple mistake when noting down the running order of the plays in Ancient times, this must be quite frustrating to Classicists.

It took me way longer to read this collection than I thought but I don't regret a single minute of it.

While some of the concepts discussed and displayed in the plays were not instantly recognisable to a 20th- and 21th-century reader, the context and explanatory notes provided by Alan H. Sommerstein were so excellent that each of the plays not only made sense but actually made it a joy to discover how Aeschylus' may have raised smiles in some and incensed others of his audiences.

And some ideas and points of view in his plays - especially the description of the Persian's defeat (in The Persians), the exposition that women may refuse marriage (in The Suppliants), and some of the rather humanist views of Prometheus (in Prometheus Bound) - were quite different from what I had expected. Or rather, different from what I have come to expect from the Ancient Greek world when coming to Ancient Greek drama after reading the Greek myths (in whichever version: Apollodorus, Ovid, or any of the modern retellings). But even coming to Aeschylus with some familiarity of other playwrights such a Sophocles, I found Aeschylus surprisingly empathetic, satirical, and ... oddly modern.

CHORUS: You didn't, I suppose, go even further than that?
PROMETHEUS: I did: I stopped mortals foreseeing their death.
CHORUS: What remedy did you find for that affliction?
PROMETHEUS: I planted blind hopes within them.
CHORUS: That was a great benefit you gave to mortals.
PROMETHEUS: And what is more, I gave them fire.

It is easy to think of Prometheus only as the rebel who went against Zeus' wishes and brought fire to mankind, but there is more to him. I loved how Aeschylus focuses not on the fire-bringing alone but also on his shared humanity, and on the prophecy that Prometheus knew of that would lead to the decline of Zeus' power, the proverbial Götterdämmerung of the Ancient Greek gods.

PROMETHEUS:
It's very easy for someone who is standing safely out of trouble to advise and rebuke the one who is in trouble.
I knew that, all along. I did the wrong thing intentionally, intentionally, I won't deny it: by helping mortals, I brought trouble on myself. But I certainly never thought I would have a punishment anything like this, left to wither on these elevated rocks, my lot cast on this deserted, neighbourless crag. Now stop lamenting my present woes: descend to the ground and hear of my future fortunes, so that you will know it all to the end. Do as I ask, do as I ask. Share the suffering of one who is in trouble now: misery, you know, wanders everywhere, and alights on different persons at different times.

Timeless themes and artful writing. I especially enjoyed the thoughts on justice presented by The Suppliant Maidens. I will be thinking about (and re-reading) Prometheus Bound for a long time... maybe one of these days I'll figure out its deeper meaning!

Aeschylus is the father of tragedy. Of his estimated 92 plays, only six confirmed works have survived to the present day (with another possible, Prometheus Bound, whose authorship is now uncertain, but once was credited to Aeschylus). Of these six, the earliest is The Persians, a notable play in that it is the only extant Greek tragedy based on contemporary events, though he was not the first to do so.

In 480 BCE the Battle of Salamis ripped through the strait between Piraeus and Salamis Island. The Greek city states and Persia battling over territory came finally to this decisive battle – an event that shaped not only the futures of Greece and Persia, but some historians argue the rest of Western Civilisation as it allowed for the preservation of Athenian democracy. Aeschylus was recalled to military service in 480 BCE became a part of the Greek force at Salamis, and fought the Persians. Eight years later, with memories of this battle still on his mind, he dramatised this now famous conflict in his play, The Persians. It is unique not only for being the only extant Greek tragedy based on contemporary events, but that Aeschylus took the opposing view. The Persians is seen from King Xerxes’s point of view.

The Persians was the second part of a trilogy (the first part had been called Phineus and can be presumed to detail Jason and the Argonauts rescue of King Phineus; the second part was Glaucus, and concerned itself either with a mythical Corinthian king or a Boeotian farmer) and won the first prize at the City Dionysia festival in 472BCE at Athens. The Persians cast Xerxes’s defeat as divine retribution for attempting to build a bridge across the Hellespont, and given Aeschylus’s apparent love of connected trilogies, one can also assume that the two missing plays concern themselves in some fashion with that theme.

The Persians is set in Susa, and a chorus of old men are joined by the Queen Mother Atossa, awaiting news of her son King Xerxes campaign against the Greeks. The chorus tell us of Xerxes’s ambitious plans.

However, the arrival of a messenger, and his detailed and gory description of the Battle of Salamis:

“But since the multitude of our ships was crowded in the narrows, and they could give no assistance the one to the other but [on the contrary] were rammed by the brazen-pointed beaks of their friends, they splintered their whole equipment of oars, the Greek ships, too, all around them noting their opportunity, kept charging them on every side, and the hulls of our vessels began to be capsized nor was the sea any longer visible, so choked was it with wrecks and slaughtered men ; and the shores and the reefs were full of them.” (p.53)

The Persians have been defeated, and Aeschylus, not missing a trick, allows a brief flurry of Greek patriotism, with the now famous cry:

“Sons of the Greeks, advance! Deliver your country, deliver your children and your wives, the temples of your fathers’ gods, the tombs of your ancestors. Now is the contest which decides all!” (p.52 – 3)

At the tomb of her dead husband Darius, Atossa summons his ghost, and Darius condemns the hubris of his son. Before departing Darius foretells of another Persian defeat at the Battle of Plataea (479BCE).

Xerxes’s arrives home, crushed by the defeat, and laments the future of his once great nation, and the failures that are to come. This final section of the play has led some to read it as being sympathetic to the Persians loss, revealing a deeper humanity within Aeschylus, whilst others have read it as a deeper celebration of one Greek victory in a brutal ongoing war. This second reading could bring in claims of xenophobia on Aeschylus’s part – but in a time of conflict, hatred of one’s enemy is natural.

The Persians became an important play, often having revivals in Greek culture, and seventy years after its premiere, it is still being referenced in Greek theatre. It is a play that also became popular in the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire. Aeschylus’s form of tragedy transcended its national boundaries, to become a true work of art. In 1993, Robert Auletta wrote and Peter Sellars directed a new version of The Persians, which articulated the play as a response to the Gulf War of 1990-1991, proving again the versatility of Aeschylus’s work.

--

The Suppliants is the first part of a lost trilogy that would have included the works The Egyptians and The Daughters of Danaus. As such, The Suppliants reads as an introduction to a larger work, and ends openly, with very few of its narrative threads resolved.

The Danaids are the fifty daughters of Danaus, and they serve as the chorus and the protagonists of The Suppliants. The Danaids are to be wed to their Egyptian cousins, but flee, and when they reach Argos plead for King Pelasgus to protect them.

King Pelasgus refuses them this request, pending the decision of the Argive people, but the people consent, and the Danaids praise the Greek gods. Then a herald of the Egyptians attempts to force the Danaids to return to their cousins for marriage, and so King Pelasgus threatens the herald and offers his protection to the women, who retreat behind Argive walls, and here the play ends.

Reconstructions of the remainder of this trilogy have it that following a war with the Egyptians, Pelasgus has been killed, and Danaus becomes tyrant of Argos. His daughters are forced into the marriage, but Danaus instructs his daughters to kill their husbands on their wedding night following a prophecy. All obey their father except Hypermnestra, whose husband Lynceus flees but later returns and murders Danaus and takes the throne with Hypermnestra. Lynceus must now decide how to punish the murderous Danaids – only with the last minute intervention of Aphrodite absolving the women of their crimes, does the play close with the Danaids marrying forty-nine local Argive men.

As an introduction to this story, The Suppliants works well. The poetry of Aeschylus’s language is more discernable here than it was in Seven against Thebes, and he uses the chorus in a much more innovative fashion than previously. The true extent of Aeschylus’s work here cannot be completed however, due to the bulk of it being missing. There is one speech from Aphrodite that is extant, and from it one can deduce that the third play at least would concern itself somewhat with the redemptive nature of love. Another of Aeschylus’s themes comes through somewhat unclearly in this first part, but would become evident in the third, and that is that society must be based upon reason. Finally there is his slight distorting of the myth for public consumption – one of the issues of the original myth was that the Danaids viewed the proposed union as incestuous, but as the Greeks thought nothing of marrying their cousins, Aeschylus downplays this issue in his retelling.

The Suppliants marks the beginning of what may have been a strong trilogy from Aeschylus – the anthropological interest of early Egyptian society being represented by a Greek alone would be fascinating – but we shall have to live with this fragment alone.

--


Like The Persians, Seven against Thebes is part of a trilogy of which the other two parts are missing. In this instance, Seven against Thebes would have been paired with Laius and Oedipus, forming a connected Oedipus trilogy. Seven against Thebes marks the first known appearance of Aeschylus’s interest in the polis (the city) being a vital development of human civilisation.

Etreocles and Polynices are the sons of the King of Thebes, Oedipus. Oedipus is resigning the throne, and so decides that his sons will alternate the throne of the city, but after a year Etreocles refuses to step down, so Polynices wages war to claim the crown, with the help of the eponymous seven.

Seven against Thebes has very little plot, but is instead constructed around a series of monologues in which a scout describes each of the seven and the devices on their respective shields.

The brother go on to kill each other in combat, and Aeschylus’s original ending, was of lamentation for these fallen men.

“Brothers indeed, and now utterly destroyed by wounds unkind in frenzied strife as a termination to their feud. Their hatred is stilled, and their life-blood is mingled with the gory dust: thus are they united by blood indeed.” (p.104)

A sudden shift in tone and style at this point in the play reveals another ending attached, some fifty years later. Antigone and Ismeme mourn their dead brothers when a messenger enters announcing an edict prohibiting the burial of Polynices. Antigone declares her intention to defy this edict. This ending was attached to capitalise on the popularity of Sophocles’ Antigone.

Seven against Thebes is a play that has caused some consternation for historians. Archaeologists have been trying to reconcile the “seven-gated Thebes” with the actual city of Thebes which had fewer entrance points than that. Some postulate that the number seven may have been chosen for symmetry, or to refer to some other myth. Nobody is quite sure.

Of all Aeschylus’s work, I find Seven against Thebes the least well formed. Its construction is dramatically unconvincing, and although his language is as rich as before, the vital element of surprise is missing from this work. Seven against Thebes seems obvious and therefore duller than his other works. Nevertheless, we are lucky that it survives – for so little of Aeschylus’s work does – and to criticise so great a playwright seems a little disserving.

Kun lukee antiikin kreikkalaisia näytelmiä. on hyvä tuntea aihetta etukäteen. Totta kai monista on kasvanut suuria perustarinoita, joiden nimet elävät edelleen, kuten Oidipus, Sisyfos, Prometheus ja niin edelleen. Prometheus itse asiassa oli syy, miksi luin tämän kokoelman. En löytänyt siitä suomeksi omaa julkaisua, joten luettiin nyt kerralla neljä antiikin tragediaa. Näissä on tietysti hyvä tiedostaa, että varsinaisia tapahtumia ei ole, kaikki kerrotaan esiintymislavalla yhdeltä toiselle ja vielä runomuodossa, joten aina tällainen tavallinen kaduntallaaja ei ole täysin perillä, mistä on kyse. Kannattaa siis käyttää esimerkiksi nettiä saadakseen lisävalaistusta. Joka tapauksessa jälleen kerran veri virtaa valtoimenaan ja naiset ovat lähinnä vaihdon välineitä. Jumalat eivät juurikaan piittaa kuolevaisista, paitsi Prometheus ja hän saikin maksaa siitä karvaasti. Jos kiinnostaa länsimaisen kulttuurin ja kirjallisuuden alku, huonomminkin voisi lukemisensa valita.

Prometheus Bound is the jewel of this collection.

Below each play review is a link to my Youtube video about that play. You can also view my overview video about Aeschylus here: https://youtu.be/b7IoIEzMTPU

Persians: This is a unique play in the canon of surviving Greek tragedy because it is the only one set entirely outside Greece/the Greek speaking world, and because it is the only play overtly about current events, all of the other plays mask their commentary about current events in a mythical structure. Premiering just eight years after the Battle of Salamis--in which Aeschylus probably fought against the Persians--this play imagines the utter despair that would have resulted in the Persian heartland and royal palace at the news of the army and navy's utter annihilation by the Greeks. This can be read as a kind of radical empathy, imagining the experience of the defeated enemy. However, the play also has Persians emphasizing the value of Greek democracy as a source of their military strength, and it has Persians--especially the ghost of Darius the Great--critiquing king Xerxes for his hubris in invading Greece, which doesn't seem like the kind of critiques people would be publicly making in an absolute monarchy with a ruler who was seen as (at least semi-)divine.
https://youtu.be/G5M1HOkVjr4

Seven Against Thebes: The editors of this edition (the Oxford version) claim that scholars have generally been either indifferent or hostile to this play. I think it's big disadvantage is that there are so many other surviving plays about the Theban conflict/House of Laius, and this is one of the least dramatically interesting--but it does have some interesting elements. I find the gender politics extremely problematic, especially because Eteokles has an excessively misogynistic speech the first time he interacts with the chorus of Theban women. Slightly less problematic but still disturbing is the rhetoric of Thebes as mother(land) and the sexualized imagery of each brother--Eteokles and Polineikes--trying to possess the city. This obviously replicates the Oedipus storyline with it's attendant problems, so it works, but it is a disturbing blending of incestuous sexuality with violence.
One bit I do think is interesting is the scene where the Scout reports who the Argive captains are and what devices are on their shields, and Eteokles analyzes them and assigns a champion of his own whose characteristics and shield device counters the opponent's. It's a long, long scene, and it probably isn't dramatically interesting. But it tells us a good deal about Greek mythology and how the Greeks thought about the relationship between themselves and the gods.
https://youtu.be/RFmC07CMxLA

The Suppliants: This might be my favorite Greek tragedy. It's a fascinating play that brings up some crucial cultural issues for the Greeks, including democracy, gender issues, and the position of foreigners in Greek city-states. The story is of a group of fifty women called the Danaids--after their father Danaos--who flee Egypt to their ancestral homeland of Argos because they are being forced to marry their cousins, the sons of Aegyptos. In Argos, they occupy a grove sacred to the gods and beg King Pelasgos for protection, which he agrees to grant only after the Argive council has democratically voted for it. This is interesting for a few reasons. One is that Argos in the mythologized eighth century--roughly where the story is set-- would not have had a democracy, but the fifth century Athens of Aeschylus' time would have. The other thing that's interesting here is that this play contains the earliest recognized version of the word that would become "democracy," though interestingly this translation largely excises the word. However, there are clear descriptions of the Greek voting process, which involved raising right hands to vote. The other thing I would argue is pro-democratic about the play is that the chorus of Danaids is the primary character. Whereas in most Greek tragedies the chorus is a secondary character that comments on action driven by individual characters, here the collective character of the chorus is the primary driver of the action.
https://youtu.be/SQ68NBQusJA

Prometheus Bound: The first time I read this play I didn't really care for it. Not much actually happens, and so it's not the most dramatically interesting play. However, as the introduction to this version suggests, Prometheus Bound is a play that moves through ideas. It's concerned with questions about fate, justice, resistance to tyranny, the nature of power, violence, and will. One really interesting aspect of the play is that Prometheus and Zeus, who are presented as implacable enemies, are actually mirror images of one another, which raises especially interesting questions about the nature of power and liberation--especially in the context of the multitude of ideologies that have seen Prometheus as a liberatory symbol of resistance to tyranny. Both Prometheus and Zeus are stubborn. Both are opportunistic. Both are relatively fickle. Both believe strongly in their own positions. And both are willing to use power to their advantage (remember that Prometheus several times takes a big part of the credit for setting up Zeus' reign, both by foreseeing the outcome of the Olympians' revolt against the Titans, and for his wisdom in organizing the new government). In this sense, they are a great example of what Rene Girard calls the monstrous double in tragedy: the two characters at the center of the agon increasingly come to resemble one another as they struggle to assign blame for whatever the central problem is. Zeus and Prometheus share multiple character traits, and because of this it's difficult to genuinely assign blame to one party (Zeus) and assert that the other is innocent (Prometheus).
https://youtu.be/LbkylIJBbH8

DrAAAA-Maaaaa!!!!

An ancient classic that seems like it shouldn't work but is done so well it does. Technically speaking not much happens in the play. Besides a little scene setting most of the play is just Prometheus telling his story and others listening and reacting to what he says. There isn't much movement just a lot of talking. That should make this a pretty boring piece but the story that Prometheus tells is so riveting that the piece feels very action packed, regardless of the complete loss of actual action.

It is theorized that Prometheus Bound is really only the first installment in a trilogy and, except for a few scraps, the next two entries in the series are lost. That is really too bad because, even though mythology tells us how the story ends, I would still have loved to have read the whole series

I read this in Sommerstein's Loeb edition, which I can't find here on GR, but I'm assuming that the translation is the same as the one in the Peguin edition.

These plays don't rise to the level of any in the Oresteia trilogy, but there are moments of brilliance that Sommerstein captures very well. These are some of the oldest plays we have and will strike new readers as strange, but they show the changing face of tragedy and must be seen from an historical perspective as well as a dramatic one.

The Loeb translations tend to be more literal than others, but Sommerstein's translation is also fluid and straightforward (as opposed to the ancient Loeb editions with their Victorian overtones.)It's nice to have this addition to the canon.

pretty well written, vaguely entertaining portrayal of one of the most well known greek myths, but not really any new or interesting ideas or worldviews presented. made a lot of sense when i found out aeschylus was a nepo baby.

n  n by n  n Aeschylus

Finished: 28.10.2024
Genre: play
Rating: A++
#BackToTheClassics
Reading time: 1,5 hr


Good News: Lives of Io and Prometheus become entangled. One must help the other. Thank goodness Aeschylus uses the 'chorus' help the reader along the way with important backstory. Pg 43 in my Kindle version of the play starts long "road trip" that Io must follow to remove Hera's curse. Irony: Io wants to die to relieve her suffering, Promethesus is unable to "die" (curse Zeus) to relieve his suffering.

Bad News: I needed to look up many Greek Gods so I could follow the story. Who was Cronos, Io, Argus etc.? Don't forget Prometheus' grandfather Oceanus. But all in all knowing this story and learning about mythology is an education in itself.

Good News: I compared this classic play with history!
Prometheus: after stealing fire from the gods, he was publicly tried and punished for his actions.
Robert Oppenheimer: was hounded out of public life. 
Prometheus gave the gift of fire;/ to man; Oppenheimer...gave man the gift of a nuclear bomb.

Personal: The only way I can get through a Greek play is while reading...translate the antiquated text into colloquial words/phrases. I give he characters new names (Prometheus = Pete, Hephaestus - Hank). I keep asking myself simple questions: what does the title mean? What does a chorus do? It is probably basic info about classic Greek plats...but by engaging actively I can make an otherwise dull play into something I can enjoy or even laugh about. Call me crazy..but this works. This was a great play...a real page-turner. Prometheus and Zeus are going to clash...but when and how? (pg 52) "Now it is happening: threat gives place to performance!" In other words... "Game on, Zeus!"
#MustReadClassic