Aeschylus
c. 525–c. 456 BCE
Biography
Aeschylus was an Athenian playwright who lived from about 525 to about 456 BCE. Ancient critics and modern scholars alike regard him as the founder of tragedy, because much of what is known about the form's early years rests on his plays and on fragments of plays that were lost. He also fought against the Persians. A tradition recorded in antiquity says that his epitaph praised his part in the Greek victory at Marathon and said nothing of his success as a dramatist.
Of the seventy to ninety plays he is said to have written, seven survive complete. The Persians, staged in 472 BCE, is the oldest complete Greek tragedy known, and it deals with the Persian invasion of Greece, a war that had ended only a few years before. The Oresteia, first performed in 458 BCE, is a sequence of three connected plays that follows the House of Atreus from Agamemnon's homecoming and murder to Orestes' trial, and it is the only trilogy from antiquity that survives intact. Aristotle credited him with adding a second actor to the stage, which let characters confront one another rather than speaking only with the chorus.
The site holds The Oresteia, the trilogy that shows his art at its fullest. Its three plays follow a family caught in cycles of killing and revenge, and end in a court where guilt is weighed by argument and a vote. With only seven complete plays surviving, this trilogy carries much of his reputation.
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Books
The Oresteia
by Aeschylus (translated by E. D. A. Morshead)
Aeschylus's trilogy follows the house of Atreus: Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon on his return from Troy, her son Orestes kills her in revenge, and the Furies pursue him until Athena sets up a court to try him. The three plays are the book's three chapters. This book…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.