How does one approach reviewing Aeschylus or any of the classics? One is dealing with a work which is thousands of years old and in and of itself a piece of history. Add to that problem that for most of us, there is no choice but to read translations of the work, rather than the original. In addition, there are only a few works remaining from only three sources (unless the authorship has been incorrectly given), so one is left to compare Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, and given that Aeschylus was writing much earlier than the others the comparison would be rather difficult given the changes that Aeschylus made to Greek Theatre. What one can discuss is how readable the translations are, and the supporting material.

Aeschylus I, number 145 in the Loeb Classical Library contains four of Aeschylus’ plays: “Persians”, “Seven Against Thebes”, “Suppliants”, and “Prometheus Bound”. The edition I have read is the 2008 publication which was edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein. In the preface, Mr. Sommerstein discusses the state of the Aeschylus volumes prior to this publication and what he attempts to accomplish with this new translation and publication of the plays. This is followed by a superb introduction which discusses Aeschylus, his life, his works, Greek Theatre, and what happened to the plays in history to bring them to the point they are now at. This is followed by the standard Bibliography, Sigla, and Abbreviations which one expects from a Loeb edition, and that brings us to the plays themselves.

Each of the plays is preceded by a section detailing the specifics of the play. When it was believed to be first performed, whether it won the Dionysia competition, what parts of the play may be suspect, what is believed to be the other plays in the production and what is known about those plays. The footnotes in the translations of the plays themselves are also quite extensive, as information about the decisions made in the translation are covered as well as more information to better help understand any unspoken meanings that Aeschylus may have been trying to convey. The translations themselves are excellent. I have read a few translations of some of these plays, and Mr. Sommerstein has done an outstanding job of helping the reader understand the play.

“Persians” opens with the council of Susa (i.e. the chorus) unsure of the fate of their army and concerned because so many men went to war so far away. They are joined by the Queen Mother, Atossa who is also concerned, because of a dream she had. News of the disaster arrives by messenger, and all are distraught. Atossa asks the chorus to summon the ghost of Darius, who at first is completely unaware of what has occurred, and then curses the hubris of his son Xerxes who led his vast army to this disaster, and then prophesizes the defeat at Plataea. Eventually Xerxes himself arrives in rags and laments the defeat and what it means to Persia.

“Seven Against Thebes” begins after Thebes has been under siege for a time, and on a day when it has been prophesized (by Teiresias) that the city will be assaulted on that very day. A scout arrives and gives Eteocles a description of what has happened outside the city and then leaves to gather more information. Eteocles comments on what he has been told and leaves to oversee the defenses. The Theben maidens arrive (i.e. The Chorus) and describe the fear and terror felt inside the city. Eteocles returns and tries to shame the women into being silent and thus not spread any more fear, they agree and Eteocles once again leaves to inspect the defenses. The Chorus continues to comment until the scout returns and Eteocles rushes back to talk to him. The scout describes each of the seven captains who are assaulting the seven gates, finishing with Polyneices Eteocles discusses how each will be dealt with, and when he learns that is brother is at the seventh gate, he decides to go there to face his brother himself. The Chorus is left alone as both the scout and Eteocles have left the stage. The scout returns and we learn that Eteocles and Polyneices have killed each other. The ending is a bit uncertain as it appears that Atigone and Ismene were added to the play for a later production. However, there is a dispute over what to do with the bodies of the two brothers.

“Suppliants” is about the Danaids who are fleeing a forced marriage and make a plea to King Pelasgus of Argos to protect them. He lets the Argive people make the decision, which is to help the Danaids. An Egyptian herald arrives to try to force the Danaids to return for the marriage, but King Pelasgus threatens the herald and pushes the Danaids to go within the walls of Argos for protection. For me, this was the most difficult play to follow, there was not much in the way of action, and significant sections of it are missing or were added in which makes it all the more difficult.

“Prometheus Bound” is the last of the plays in this volume, and along with “Persians” is the most enjoyable one to read. Some question whether Aeschylus actually wrote the play, but regardless it is an interesting one. The play opens with Prometheus being escorted to the wrong to which he will be bound by Power (Kratos), Violence (Bia), and Hephaestus, the smith. Violence never utters a word, nor does Prometheus himself during this initial period, but Power mocks Prometheus and Hephaestus is empathetic to Prometheus’s position. Power pushes Hephaestus until the job is done, and then the three leave Prometheus alone. For the remainder of the play Prometheus is chained to the rock, lamenting his position, and talking to those who come to see him, such as the daughters of Oceanus (Chorus), Oceanus, Io, and at the end Hermes. The play pits the tyranny of Zeus against Prometheus and his (Prometheus’s) love for man.

This is an excellent edition of the Loeb library, and the new translations of Aeschylus are quite good. One could argue that any edition of classic works deserves five stars, but in this case it is really earned.

Some have compared Prometheus to Jesus Christ. Certainly the opening scene of Aeschylus's play, with Prometheus splayed upon a rock as he is bound by Hephaestus, invites the comparison. I would not go so far and see the interplay between the Greek gods to be the relevant context for this scene. Played out at the "world's limit" in a bleak setting the drama portrays Prometheus suffering punishment for making humans "intelligent and masters of their minds". (line 444)

Prometheus' crime is not the only reason for his punishment for the chorus tells us that there is a war going on between the "Old" gods (Olympians) and the new generation of Gods. Zeus is seeking to maintain his primacy while Prometheus and his brothers are the dangerous new gods on the block. Atlas is suffering as well carrying the weight of the whole world on his back. The scales are not even - their is nothing like fairness or justice in this world. Prometheus is doomed even as he is visited by Io who is also suffering due to Hera's jealous rage over Zeus's attentions.

Being a god does not seem to lead to a completely pleasant life - there is strife and anger at every turn even for the most powerful. The winners in this play seem to be humans who do not have to relinquish the gifts endowed them by Prometheus. However, even these can be seen as a two-edged sword for our ancestors who had to endure hardships of many kinds in the struggle of living in the world. Prometheus cries out "O sky that circling brings light to all, you see how unjustly I suffer!" (lines 1091-2) Could that be our own cry even today?

Not as good as other plays by sophocles and euripedies

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.

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.

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.

Though I’ve already written a review in Romanian for Prometheus Bound, it would have been strange if I didn’t write something about the entire volume that includes four of Aeschylus’ tragedies: The Suppliant Maidens, The Persians, The Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound.

What you need to know about Aeschylus is that he is one of the three emblematic figures of Greek tragedy along with Sophocles and Euripides. It is said that Aeschylus wrote around one hundred plays during his lifetime, but only seven survived the test of time, four of which I’ve mentioned above, while the other three form the Oresteia Trilogy. Aeschylus is also known for introducing the second actor on the stage. He gradually diminished the role of the chorus and he shifted the focus from the lyricism of the composition to the dialogue – an important change that gives the tragedy its dramatic characteristics we all recognize even today. For his artistic achievements, Aeschylus is also called the Father of Tragedy and he is praised by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his famous work, Poetics.

The Suppliant Maidens (Ἱκέτιδες) is the earliest play of Aeschylus’ that survived to the present day, but it is less known in contrast with his other works. I actually read this one last because the subject didn’t appeal to me that much and I found the play pretty mediocre in theme and ‘action’. The subject has its roots in Greek mythology and it is the story of Danaus’ daughters who flee from Egypt to Argos, in order to avoid their incestuous marriages to the sons of Aegyptus, who were their cousins. The maidens (escorted by their father) find shelter in Argos hoping not to be captured by their suitors. In order to help the newcomers, Pelasgus (the King of Argos) asks his people to vote and their decision is crucial for the maidens’ destinies. Though the other two parts of the trilogy are lost, there are some scarce references to what happens to the maidens in Prometheus Bound and in one of Horace’s Odes.
E. D. A. Moreshead wrote about The Persians (Πέρσαι) that it “was brought out in 472 B.C., eight years after the sea-fight of Salamis which it commemorates” (p. 5), a play that had a great significance for those who fought against the Persian Empire in the Battles of Termopilæ, Marathon, Salamis and Plataea. The Persians might be the second play of a trilogy “standing between the Phineus and the Glaucus” (Idem.), Phineus being a prophet like Tiresias, who foreshadowed the conflict that is depicted in The Persians. I won’t spoil your read, but I will only add that, through this play, Aeschylus sends a patriotic message to his fellow Athenians and he revives their past victories against the Persians or the triumph of civilisation against barbarism, as Ovidiu Drîmba writes in his study of the history of theatre. t
The Seven Against Thebes (Ἑπτὰ ἐπὶ Θήβας) depicts the siege of Thebes along with the cruel fate of the two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, who were cursed by their father, the late King Oedipus, for not taking care of their blind parent and for their selfishness and thirst for power. From my point of view, the most lyrical and heartbreaking parts of the play are those recited by the Chorus of Maidens, who depict the terrific battle scenes and address helpless and desperate prayers to the gods to protect the city and not let it fall into the hands of their enemy. The irony is that the name Thebes doesn’t appear anywhere in the text, but Cadmea or Cadmus. The one that gave the play the name we all know was actually Aristophanes, who referred to it in his comedy Frogs as "the Seven against Thebes, a drama instinct with War, which anyone who beheld must have yearned to be a warrior" (p. 6).

In Prometheus Bound (Προμηθεὺς Δεσμώτης), Titan Prometheus is punished by Zeus for creating the first humans, for stealing the Sacred Fire from Mt. Olympus and for giving it to the earthlings to start the process of civilisation. Though Prometheus is bound to a rock on Mt. Elbrus and Zeus uses various types of torture to make the titan repent, Prometheus stands tall and doesn’t have any reason to be ashamed or to apologize for what he has done. He has the power to predict the future and that future will not be a bright one for Mighty Zeus. Prometheus is not afraid of Zeus because he is immortal; therefore, all he has to do is to endure all the torture until his saviour will fulfil the prophecy. Unfortunately for us, the second and third plays of the Promethean trilogy are lost, but we can find out who the saviour is by reading the Greek myths.

Overall, the plays were very interesting, due to their unique structure and well-known characters from history and myths, but the language was pretty old and sometimes difficult to understand – a factor that made the reading too slow for my liking. I’m sure that I would have enjoyed this volume a little more if the writing had been a bit more modern, but this is a matter of taste.

http://elitere.ro/four-plays-of-aesch...

http://elitere.ro/four-plays-of-aesch...

3.5 stars rounded down. A great start to western drama.

Persians - 4 stars
Otototoi, you are saying / that the dead bodies of our loved ones / are floating, soaked and constantly buffeted by salt water, / shrouded in mantles that drift in the waves! (274-277)

But Artembares, the commander of ten thousand horse, is being pounded against the rugged shores of Sileniae; and took an effortless leap out of his ship; and the excellent Tenagon, a noble of the Bactrians, now wanders around the wave-beaten island of Ajax. (305)

The hulls of our ships turned keel-up, and the sea surface was no longer visible, filled as it was with the wreckage of ships and the slaughter of men; the shores and reefs were also full of corpses. (415)

Terribly lacerated by the sea - pheu! - / they are being savaged by the voiceless children - ehhh-e! - / of the Undefiled - o-ahh! / Bereaved houses mourn their men, / and aged parents. (576-580)

Seven Against Thebes - 3 stars
For I speak of the transgression / born long ago, punished swiftly, but remaining to the third / generation, when Laius, defying / Apollo, who had told him thrice / at the central navel of earth, / the oracular sanctuary of Pytho, to die / without issue to save his city, / mastered by his own cherished, unwise counsels, / begot his own death, / Oedipus the father-slayer, / who sowed the sacrosanct soil / of his mother, where he had been nurtured, / and suffered a bloodstained progeny: / it was mindless madness / that brought that bridal couple together. (743-757)

Suppliants -3 stars

Prometheus Bound -3.5 stars
Now drive the remorseless bite of the adamantine wedge with all your power right through his chest. (64-65)

In the first place, the Father will tear this rugged ravine wall into fragments with his thunder and the fire of his lightning-bolt, and will bury you under it, gripped in the embrace of the rocks. After the completion of a vast length of time, you will come back again to the light; and then, I tell you, the winged hound of Zeus, the bloodthirsty eagle, will greedily butcher your body into great ragged shreds, coming uninvited for a banquet that lasts all day, and will feast on your liver, which will turn black with gnawing. (1015-1025)

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

These are 4 plays by the father of Greek tragedy, and are interesting both as early examples of the dramatic art (the use of the Chorus for example) and as celebrations of Greek culture and traditions.

I had only read The Persians before and that has a real historical background against which Aeschylus explores his themes of tyranny and divine justice. It is a very powerful drama full of anguish and despair. Prometheus Unbound is probably the most famous of Aeschylus’ plays, but it is the middle part of a trilogy and suffers because the two other parts have been lost. Nevertheless, the clash between the gods and mortals is a compelling one. Seven Against Thebes was the least memorable and didn’t even have the same ‘feel’ as the others.

A surprise favourite for me was The Suppliant Maidens where I liked the way the language unfolded. The maidens are fleeing from forced marriage in Egypt and seek shelter in Greece, and within this simple concept Aeschylus explores the tradition of such marriages, the descent of the maidens in a divine line from Io and Zeus, and the ethics of the Greek people who must decide whether to shelter the maidens. It’s simple but really well done.

The 3 star rating is for the translation and this particular edition . Not necessarily for the plays themselves .

Prometheus bound - I love that this explored Gods in a different light . What do we call Gods ? Especially when they do more harm than good . Prometheus has always been a figure cloaked in mystery and misery for me and this somehow added to his enigma . Io's has one of the saddest stories ever even by Ancient Greek standard . Her opening speech was particularly powerful and heart wrenchingly beautiful .

Suppliants - Definitely a play that is different in tone than the other ones . I found it ironic that the Danaids are asking mainly for the help of Zeus FROM rapists . The suffering he and Hera caused Io ( Their ancestor ) was just too raw in my mind . Anyway , this was interesting . The way Pelasgus handled everything was fun to witness .

Seven against Thebes - Possibly my favorite from this collection . This was so moving and beautiful . The way the events unfolded mirrored the way they did in Oedipus the king . The way Aeschylus questioned the idea of free will in myths was in contrast to Sophocles . And Antigone and Ismene's mourning was beautifully rendered . The way the chorus split away at the end !! I fell for this play tbh.

Persians - This was unique . Instead of a myth or a legend , actual history is the main focus here . I loved the little parts where Athens is praised . We can actually see the author trying to please the group of Athenians sitting in front of him . As a whole , this was informative and enjoyable .

Thoughts on the collection - I didn't really like this edition because the notes were lacking in content . I also didn't enjoy the writing that much . So I'm going to try out different editions and translations .

Aeschylus has only seven surviving plays to his name. One of those (Prometheus Unbound) is now heavily disputed to be his. Vellacott's translation is of the four that are not the only full surviving trilogy - the Oresteia - which has entered deep into Western culture in its own right.

Self-evidently the survival of these plays, preceding the work of Sophocles and Euripides, testifies to the regard in which he was held but the lack of his other plays (which may have amounted to 90) and the non-survival of those of his rivals suggests that we are seeing only the tip of an iceberg.

Aeschylus was not the only playwright of his time, his audience would have been demanding under conditions that were semi-sacred as well as popular and the dispute over 'Prometheus Unbound' indicates that others could probably reach high levels of attainment.

Still, Aeschylus was clearly regarded as an innovator who reached heights of rhetoric and drama not achieved before, above all (it is said) introducing characters who related to each other and not just singly with the Chorus.

These four non-Oresteian plays still stand up to scrutiny even if we need guidance in order to think our way into what it must have been like to be presented with performances that were as much a type of free form religious and political experience as theatre, at least as we understand it.

Contemporary fashion tends to favour 'The Persians' both because of its unique references to contemporary events and because the modern mind favours what appears to be a transfer of empathy towards the defeated (the Persians) although I think this has been exaggerated.

My favourite - the one that still moves me - is the heroic war poem-drama 'Seven Against Thebes' which seems to capture the barbarism of city-state conflict prior to the Athenian discovery of 'reason' in all its raw energy just as it introduces us to the civic morality of tragedy.

Its masculinity is overt - there is a remarkable scene where King Eteocles upbraids the Theban women for destabilising the war effort through their inability to restrain their sentiments and their excess of religiosity. it is patriarchal but Eteocles has a strong point here.

This heroic rawness is perhaps what Nietzsche had in mind in condemning what Socratic reasoning was to do to the ability of Greeks to maintain their ability to prosper as 'peak humans'. It is less comfortable for our culture to read than faux-empathy in the propaganda against the Persians.

The other two plays read well in Vellacott's translation but they suffer more from being detached from the other plays in their trilogies. The Oresteia works for us today because it 'unfolds' with a form of thesis and antithesis resulting in a synthesis of more civic moral worth based on reason.

The meaning of Greek tragic drama is too complex an issue to deal with in a brief GoodReads review but the religio-political aspects lie in 'squaring' our nature with social obligation especially when various obligations start to clash. Which is to win out?

In 'Seven Against Thebes' King Eteocles is primarily honour bound to defend his City against raiders brought against it by his estranged brother Polyneices (whose lack of proper burial later will be the cause of another great tragedy by Sophocles in 'Antigone').

However, he is also bound not to spill the blood of his brother. Yet fate has decreed that he must fight him to the death at the seventh gate. The fate is written as part of a set of individual crimes with origins in breaching past taboo afflicting blood lines - the Oresteia is another such example.

In this case, the taboos breached are all those surrounding Oedipus, father of both Eteocles and Polyneices by his own mother Jocasta and compounded by Oedipus' curse on his sons because of their rejection of him. Antigone is going to be just the next stage in a succession of horrors.

Eteocles is actually given a choice by his own advisers, to send another hero against his brother or perhaps switch gates which a King could choose to do but Eteocles will not do this. The heroic lies in not avoiding an impossible moral choice with no good end if it is 'fated'.

Once it has happened that the allocation of the seventh gate is to him and that the raider on that gate is his brother, the tragedy unfolds as inevitable ... not as a choice or a matter of rational calculation but as an 'ill-fated' moral necessity to do an evil thing less evil than another evil thing.

Of course, the audience is seeing him put his City first but the avoidance of choice cannot have gone unnoticed nor its association with the legendary world's heroic barbarism. Tragedy is here truly cathartic, filled with a vicarious death instinct in which life is truly lived.

The fourteen heroes, raiders and Thebans, are all totally disregarding of death, placing honour and glory ahead of a quiet life, much as we have come to expect from Homer. Perhaps the dramatists want all Athenians to be heroes when necessary ... but only when rationally necessary.

In our own day, this brings us back to the legacy of Nietzsche but also to an awareness that just because God is dead does not mean civilisation is dead. Our general cultural incomprehension of Eteocles' decision-making possibly defines the full victory of 'reason' over 'life'.

This play, set alongside the defiance of 'God' in 'Prometheus Unbound' and the brilliant exposition of girlish terror of quasi-incestuous rape and of social obligation in 'The Suppliants', shows a society living in a state of reason performatively exploring questions of sentiment and honour.

We cannot honestly know what a Greek citizen thought of all this but the fact that such plays were far from unusual and highly regarded suggests that an entire society needed 'drama' in some way to 'square' the conflicts within itself and get debate going about right action.

The gods too are 'real' although it is hard to get a fix on how an ancient actually felt about these capricious and often cruel creations. The overwhelming sense is of the gods, under all-father Zeus, maintaining right order in the world where right order was not always that of reason.

If the city was based on reason among men, nature and society or rather natural social relations in family and tribe and in war were not. The gods, who spoke for right order outside men's rules, ruled this world of natural social relations, right behaviour and right ritual.

'Squaring' civil order with the natural order (including the justified sentiments of society and culture prior to the laws) must have been a constant process of civil and personal negotiation. Greek tragedy helped worked out the limits of the game and educate a populace about them.

In 'The Suppliants'. Pelasgus King of Argos explores every 'reasonable' argument why he should not plunge his people into war to save the 'virtue' of 50 distant relatives threatened with rape by their Egyptian cousins.

In the end, he accepts, having realised that a higher law answerable to the Gods requires that he protect the girls, that he must challenge the Egyptians despite the inevitable grim result. His people agree with him. This is community heroism and truly absurd in the existential sense.

The sense we get is of the very real belief in a 'higher law' provided by the Gods (although this means within a framework laid out with strict justice and order by Zeus) whose breach must lead to tragedy often generations later and that reasoning is there to endorse this law not thwart it.

None of this higher law is systematised as in the religions of the book. It is customary and oral - things everybody knows are right but which have to be policed with frequent reminders directed as much at the forgetful as at the young. Community survival is at stake.

Doing the right thing (which is very different from the Judaeo-Christian faith-based 'being good') is not easy. The lesson of the tragedies is that not doing the right thing creates imbalances in the natural order that will be corrected in time - at the expense of your own blood line.

Drama appears later to move more strongly not so much towards expressing the crisis of heroic sentiments and the tragic results of breaching taboo but more heavily towards civic society as the resolution of the crises created by the old way of doing things - but our evidence remains sparse.

Greek Tragedy is complex and multi-layered, not easily analysed or summarised in secular terms, highly suggestive even while laying out its grim facts with crystal clarity. This is a shame and not a guilt culture. One should be shamed for soiling one's own blood line and 'fating' one's children.

Vellacott is an old translation (1961) but highly readable and directed at credible performance. With minimal academic infrastructure, he points out corrupt texts where they matter and provides indications of the sort of metaphor and references relevant to understanding the plays.