An interesting collection of plays but over all I have mixed feelings about them. Each had some great points to them but I can't help feeling some sort of lackluster thoughts. The plays, by today's and even later classical playwrights standards fell slightly flat. I could not help but think that nothing substantial had happened. I am aware that these plays are one part of a trilogy so I do not grudge Aeschylus or think these are not worth reading, but it did feel like a single act over a complete play. That being said, these plays were still an enjoyable and insightful experience and I feel that this read was time well spent. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in classical tragedy
Out of the 4 plays presented here The suppliants and The Persians were by far my favourites. I found the threat of ritual pollution threatened by the daughters of Danaus and the tricky position the king was put in to be absolutely riveting ideas. The Persians was such a great read. I got what I expected in terms of Athenian boasting but the Persians were surprisingly human. While you felt the pride the Athenians would have felt you also feel the crushing defeat and uncertainty of the Persians. Overall, interesting concepts and executions. Footnotes were minimal and not very useful

An excellent collection of Ancient Greek plays which have stood the test of time. The four plays herein - translated ably by Philip Vellacott - are, along with the three plays of the Oresteia, all that remains of Aeschylus' work.

'Prometheus Bound' is the best, and the reason I picked up this book in the first place. Prometheus' struggle has always been, to my mind, the most compelling of all the Greek myths, but even so I was surprised at just how much depth Aeschylus discovered in the tale. 'Prometheus Bound' is a commentary on tyranny, rationalism, faith, mortality, justice and hubris all rolled into one (in a total of about thirty pages, no less!), with intriguing little suggestions that the story - benevolent Prometheus against the tyrannical Zeus - may not be as clear-cut as is often supposed. I am now even more fascinated by the story of Prometheus than I was going in, and am disappointed that the play's follow-ups, 'Prometheus Unbound' and 'Prometheus the Fire-Bringer', have not survived into modern times.

Having wanted to read just 'Prometheus Bound', the other three plays in the collection turned out to be a nice bonus. All four plays had plenty of poetic turns of phrase and a lofty, yet very human, morality. 'The Suppliants' sees a kingdom take in a group of refugee women who have fled forced marriages, with the king resolving to defy their would-be husbands by force if necessary. 'Seven Against Thebes' tells the story of an assault on the seven-gated city of Thebes, with a brother-vs-brother tragedy that has no small amount of pathos. The final play, 'The Persians', wasn't in my opinion as stellar as the others, but still has enough about it to be worth a read.

All in all, the translated plays were surprisingly accessible (no matter how many ancient classics I read, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, I am somehow always still amazed at just how well they come across) and I feel much more confident about the prospect of reading more Ancient Greek classics going forward. I've always wanted to read Lysistrata by Aristophanes and the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes. Having enjoyed this book so much, I'm probably going to add Aeschylus' Oresteian trilogy to my list too.

it feels kinda silly to read a collection of plays by one of the greats in western canon, the father of greek tragedy, famous for 2500 years now, and be like “pretty good. 4/5 stars.”

but i read this collection immediately after having finished the oresteia, and these four suffered a bit in direct comparison to those three plays! THAT trilogy was aeschylus’ masterpiece. these were on the next rung down. here, i loved and had a pretty strong emotional connection with “the persians” and thought there were some great lines from the defiant protagonist of “prometheus unbound,” but the other two plays didn’t make much of an impact on me.

i feel weirdly sad to have finished this collection! no more new aeschylus to read ever again now that i’ve finished these seven. although, maybe someday we’ll discover more and i’ll still be around for it. it could happen! and it was enjoyable and rewarding to read what has remained, what lasted, of what he wrote so long ago.

As theater goes I have read nothing of higher caliber than this. Prometheus Bound especially stirs great emotion in the reader and would be amazing to see live. The conversations with the Ocean, the nature of the gods, mans relation to fire. It is all very poetic and lovely. It was a sheer pleasure to read these works of Aeschylus.

This collection of plays contains 4 out of 7 of Aeschylus' surviving plays: Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes and The Persians. Of these I preferred Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes over the other two, though they are all very good plays and are worth reading for anyone interested in Ancient Greece.

Although I thought it was worthwhile to finish up reading the rest of Aeschylus' extant plays, they do not have the same urgency about them that The Oresteia did. The assumption is that these are the surviving plays from other trilogies, and so much of the thematic drive is lost.

None of the plays are bad, though I thought The Suppliant Maidens to be the least interesting. The Persians seems to be unique more for the subject matter than the actual play, and Seven Against Thebes is much less dramatic than I thought it would be.

Prometheus Bound seems to me to be the standout, dealing as it does with the idea of the Rebel and the Usurpation of power, as well as the idea of Justice. There are other ideas at work here as well, and I thought David Grene's short introduction was excellent for it scope and succinctness.

At some point in the past, I had read another translation of Prometheus Bound--whether it was the fault of the translation or not, I can't say, but I remember that it didn't hold my interest well. This time, for whatever reason, I thought it was engrossing.

In this edition, Suppliant Maidens and The Persians are translated by Seth Benardete. Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus are translated by David Grene.

Very quick, very light to read. Of course, Greek mythology often is.
I'm studying this book as a part of my university course in English, called "The Tragedy of Knowledge". And what is there to be derived from the tale of Prometheus? Perhaps, the very cliche conclusion that "knowledge is might". However, some would say, Prometheus is far from mighty strapped with chains on a rock, doomed to be tortured in the worst way possible for eons to come. God of knowledge, the benefactor of man kind, sharing his knowledge with creatures that "live for a day" has caused him to lose his standing. What, are we to make then?
Like a teacher, Prometheus did his best to teach his pupils how to advance. But, as it is evident even in our times, no party in power wants the people beneath them to be educated. Because then they would rebel. Against the gods, against authority in general. Therefore, Zeus acts like every other tyrant or king or person-in-power has acted over history and punishes the one who attempts to educate people and, thus, threaten his authority. Prometheus is a rebel. To him, mortals are not insignificant, but rather they are those who give the Olympian gods their power.
Therefore, my conclusion is that knowledge must be shared. Even if it will have dire consequences for the sharer.

n  Prometheus Boundn: I really enjoyed being thrown back to high school and remembering Io the cow and all the crazy stories of the Greek gods. In this short play, Prometheus, who gave humans the gift of fire, is condemned to being chained to a mountain for having done so because Zeus doesn't approve. Io shows up and her reveals to her that she still has a long way before she will eventually conceive a child from Zeus.

n  The Suppliantsn: In this one the fifty daughters of Danaus (some descendant of Zeus and Io) are running away from their fifty cousins who want to bed them.

"Let them die before they ever lay hands
On us their cousins, to enter our unwilling beds,
Which Right forbids them!"

At least they understand how it works and know that bedding cousins is probably a BAD idea. This is putting Oedipus to serious shame. ;)
The whole play is pretty much about the ladies moaning and imploring the gods and the King of Argos, whom they chance upon and implore to help them. It was pretty crazy, but what would you expect from descendants of Zeus and a cow?

"The child pastured amid flowers,
The Calf whom Zeus begot
Of the Cow, mother of our race,
Made pregnant by the breathing and caress of Zeus"

n  Seven Against Thebesn: This one was my favourite and a sort of prologue to Antigone, it tells the story of how the two brothers came to kill each other. For some reason the end made me laugh.

"Antigone: For you who died.
Ismene: For you who killed.
Antigone: My heart is wild with sobs.
Ismene: My soul groans in my body.
Antigone: Brother, whom I weep for -
Ismene: Brother, most pitiable -
Antigone: You were killed by your brother.
Ismene: You killed your brother.
Antigone: Twofold sorry to tell of -
Ismene: Twofold sorrow to see -
Antigone: Sorrow at the side of sorrow!
Ismene: Sorrow brother to sorrow!"

It's not even funny, but late at night it was.

n  The Persiansn: My least favourite, about the account of the battle of Salamis and the victory of the Athenians over Xerxes' army, and the latter's curse. It was good but less engaging than the rest.

The four plays (Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes and The Persians) are 2,500 year-old classics covering interesting elements of Greek mytho-history. The introduction serves to contextualise well, hinting at the strong presence of women as a thread through the plays; divine expectation, capriciousness and punishment are also themes that spring from the source material.

I'm familiar with Vellacott's translations, primarily his work on Euripedes and thought they were excellent. I found this translation somewhat wooden and did struggle to keep interested at points (Seven Against Thebes was a particular moment). So at times I cross-referenced against the Greek text online and did my own translation of some paragraphs which gave me a renewed appreciation for Vellacott's lyrical work here. I think any problems with flow are down to the source material: fragmented pages (some having not survived the trials of time) and Aeschylus's style.

I do feel that the text is light on annotation. There are some few translation endnotes but they're arbitrarily given and plenty in the text remains unexplained.

This probably remains the standard entry point for these plays.

These four plays, along with the Oresteia tetralogy, constitute all of the surviving tragedies by the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus. I enjoyed all of them greatly but by far my favorite is Prometheus Bound and my least The Suppliant Maidens. All are great and are must reads for any ancient history enthusiast.

Read Prometheus Bound on 30 Jan 15.

I recommend that you look at Terence's review at http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... , but I would like to add some remarks to his.

Amongst these plays I much preferred The Persians. It opens with the elderly councilors to Xerxes who remained behind in Susa. They recall the pride and confidence with which the Persian army set forth but now are filled with foreboding and anxiety at the lack of news of victory. The tension between these emotions is very well drawn. The sense of foreboding is heightened when Xerxes' mother arrives and relates a dream and an omen. Then the news of Persia's calamity at Salamis arrives. The messenger recounts the battle - since Aeschylus was probably in the Athenian navy at Salamis (in any case, since the play was written only 8 years after that battle, he surely knew what he was writing about), I found this report to be riveting and composed in a noble and exciting poetry. In their grief they summon the shade of Darius, Xerxes' father (not the last ghost to haunt Western theater), who warns at length against hubris (he is clearly Aeschylus' puppet here). Then the defeated Xerxes arrives to emphasize in most dramatic speech the disastrous consequences of hubris. This emphasis on hubris is, of course, Greek, not Persian. But I very much appreciate that Aeschylus, instead of gloating over the Greeks' victory, empathized with the defeated foe.

This play has none of the frequent invocations, laments and pleas to the gods found in the other plays. I understand that ancient Greek drama had religious ceremony at its origin and only slowly developed its more human concerns, and, since Aeschylus is the eldest of the Greek playwrights whose work has survived, it is natural that there are, seemingly, more such invocations in his work. But, as understandable as it may be, it was a relief not to have to read them in The Persians . And since much of Prometheus Bound consists of such addresses, my pleasure in that play, clearly the most dramatic of the four in this book, was diminished.

Indeed, I find that I disagree with the relative ranking of Prometheus Bound and The Suppliants made by so many. Yes, Prometheus Bound can be read as a rebellion against tyranny, but as such an allegory it is quite thin. The rebellion occurred before the action of the play - the play is actually about the sufferings of those who rebel against tyranny. This is emphasized by the arrival of Io. How much more appealing, to my mind, is the story of a father trying to shelter his daughters (their number, 50, is absurd, but let that pass) from violent and unwanted suitors! And the moment when King Pelasgus realizes how bad of a situation the arrival of the descendants of Io has placed him in is real.

As for Seven Against Thebes, the less said the better. I was not surprised to read, after I had finished the play and felt that the appearance of Antigone and Ismene was superfluous, that Aeschylus' original ending was replaced by this foreign appendage 50 years after his death.

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