Please note this is not intended to be a comprehensive coverage of the play (despite my logorrhea and multiple posts), just a few notes on the play that I find interesting. I’m rusty at this, but let’s give it a go.

Original performance, 472 BCE

The tetralogy of plays at the Great Dionysia of 472 BCE submitted by Aeschylus were

• Phineus
• Persians
• Glaukos of Potniai
• Prometheus Pyrkaeus (satyr play)

The Persians was the middle dramatic play. None of the other plays survive, but there is a possible theme of retribution running throughout the plays. Phenius “presumably dealt with Jason and the Argonauts’ rescue of King Phineus from the torture that the monstrous harpies inflicted at the behest of Zeus.” (Source for this and information on the other plays from a now dead site: primidi.com) Glaukos was either a mythical Corinthian king who was devoured by his horses because he angered the goddess Aphrodite … or else a Boeotian farmer who ate a magical herb that transformed him into a sea deity with the gift of prophecy. Roughly translated, Prometheus Pyrkaeus is Prometheus the fire-kindler. From surviving fragments, this comedy appears to take a look at mishaps that occur upon humans receiving the gift of fire. Maybe there’s a central theme of being careful what you wish for running through these plays?

Aeschylus was awarded the first prize at these plays’ original performance in Athens. Also, Aeschylus was invited by Hieron, the ruler of Syracuse, to restage The Persians in his city.

As noted in the related post about Aeschylus’ role in his plays, he wrote The Persians, composed the music, developed the choreography, directed the play, and probably acted in it. However, he did not have the financial backing to stage it or hire the additional actors. “[T]he name of the choregos (the citizen who trained and equipped the chorus at his own expense) on this occasion is recorded in an inscription: it is Pericles.” (Aeschylus, John Herington, 28) Not bad company to keep and have as a backer.

The play

The Persians is a sympathetic look at Athens’ deadliest foe (to that point) and the Greek defeat of Persia in 480/479 BCE. Many in the audience would have fought at Salamis and probably at other battles against Persia in the previous twenty years. Greeks framed the war between themselves and Persia as a battle between freedom and slavery, so sympathizing with the starters of what they viewed as an unjust war took a lot of courage. Much has been made about this being the only surviving play not based in myth, but I have to wonder how much of the Persian War had reached mythical status by this point? There is enough free invention in the play, including the Persians anachronistically performing Greek rituals and calling out to Greek gods, to distance itself from what really happened for the cause of drama.

Aeschylus set the play in Sousa, the Persian court, and made sure to adorn the Persians with fantastic wealth and exotic clothes. Again, how much is myth in his casting of the Persians, what the Athenians want to see in their exquisitely pampered, conquered foe?

This is a specific play, set in a specific time and between specific foes. Yet The Persians transcends these limitations and obtains a universality, spanning time and place. I read this today, almost 2500 years after the play, and it resonates with me. Even though the Persians are aggressors, you can sympathize with their loss.

The play opens with a Chorus of elderly Persian men not able to participate in the invasion of Greece awaiting news of the expedition. There are many mixed messages here for the Persians: golden riches but slavery, a “destroyer of cities” but a sense of foreboding. The dread of not having heard anything yet from the expedition deepens. The Queen Mother (Xerxes’ mother, Darius’ wife) enters and echoes their sense of dread. She relates a dream of Xerxes trying to yoke two women, one Persia and one Greece, together to a chariot. Yoking was mentioned twice in the earlier Chorus, once in noting the attempt to yoke Hellas (Greece) and Persia together, as well as Xerxes’ successful yoking the “neck of the sea,” the Hellespont.

The Queen asks the Chorus about Athens, and in probably the poems’ most famous lines she asks

Queen: Who commands them? Who is shepherd of their host?

Chorus: They are slaves to none, nor are they subject.

(lines 242 – 3; translation by S. G. Benardete)

A herald arrives and fulfills everyone’s foreboding: “The lifeless rotting corpses glut the shores, And adjacent fields of Salamis.” (272 – 3) After reassuring the Queen that Xerxes survived, the herald then describes the Athenian strategy and lists some of the dead, many names heard earlier from the Chorus. It’s interesting that the herald describes the “guile” used by an Athenian (Themistocles in Herodotus) that was key to their victory.

In order to make sense of what has happened at Salamis, the Queen summons the spirit of her dead husband, Darius, who sees the defeat a culmination of the gods punishing Xerxes for his hubris. Since Darius suffered a similar defeat, he speaks with authority on this in what I think is Aeschylus’ central point:

And corpses, piled up like sand, shall witness,

Mute, even to the century to come,

Before the eyes of men, that never, being

Mortal, ought we cast out thoughts too high.

Insolence, once blossoming, bears

Its fruit, a tasseled field of doom from which

A weeping harvest’s reaped, all tears. (817 – 23)

Strange. Xerxes is only carrying out Darius’ intent to re-invade Greece. Darius died before it could be carried out, though, so maybe this is an example in Greek drama where death and the afterlife give the shadow special insight. There’s also a dig by Aeschylus in lines 750s about ancestral wealth vs. earned wealth and those badmouthing Xerxes for playing “the warrior at home” and becoming wealthier, until they have a chance to enrich themselves by invading Greece. Again, be careful for what you wish for? And wait, the Queen mother describes her own son as a coward here. To say there are mixed messages would be an understatement.

Xerxes finally appears, stunned and in rags. He and the chorus lament what has been lost in the invasion of Greece. After all the sumptuous finery presented around the Persian court, Xerxes’ appearance would be a major fall to earth.

From what I remember about Aeschylus’ plays, he is very attuned to suffering by women. This one is a little more selective, but still shows a special affinity for women. The Queen stands in for the suffering for all the other Persian mothers who lost family members, with calls of “Dishonor,” and “Never shall we betray them.” Yet she didn’t lose her son in the battle, while the herald talks of the piles of bodies of the dead. She’s suffering, but not like the other women.

A few words on imagery…the rending of garments is a frequent image in the play, and the meaning changes a little depending on who is rending and why. There’s also a frequent imagery of yoking together, not always successful. And the imagery of full versus empty comes into play quite a bit.  The hollowness of empire, of human pride, is a major takeaway at the end of the play. Just a few things to look for when reading the play.

One more possible lesson from the play:

Queen: “My friends, whoever’s wise in ways of evil

Knows how, when a flood of evil comes,

Everything we grow to fear, but when

A god our voyage gladdens, we believe

Always that fortune’s never-changing wind

Will blow. (598 – 603)

So what was Aeschylus trying to do in The Persians? Provide a human side to a defeated foe? Likely. Despite the low Athenian casualty numbers reported in Herodotus and elsewhere, there were losses that many in the audience would have keenly felt. Was it to warn the Athenians against imperial aims of their own? If so, he failed. Terribly. I think that this is reading a little too much into the play at that time, though. The Delian League was still in the initial stages and had not yet become the empire-creating funding source that Athens eventually used it for. Although Athens behavior in the League had been bullying from the start, particularly from Cimon. And it was only one year after the production of The Persians that the island of Naxos became the first defector from the League.

I tend to side with those that look at the lines around 820 as the key takeaway in not casting your thoughts too high. In this sense Aeschylus is echoing the poetry of Solon, warning that those who try to reach too far will be doomed to fail. As such, this may be viewed as a universal warning, but obviously one he is aiming **at** the Athenians as much as for them.  

Related posts

Aeschylus by John Herington, Hermes Book Series, Yale University Press, 1986.

Aeschylus’ The Persians by Reading Greek Tragedy Online (many more resources available at YouTube link)

Links

A guide to The Persians by Shelby Brown

Aeschylus: A Guide to Selected Sources by Sarah Burges Watson at Living Poets: A New Approach to Ancient Poetry