Biography of Aeschylus

Adapted for IH students by Professor Robin Mitchell-Boyask from the Perseus on-line Encyclopedia entry

Born at Eleusis in Attica, ca. 525 B.C.E
Died Gela in Sicily, ca. 455 B.C.E.
Ancient biographies are notoriously unreliable because many traditions about artists' lives arose well after they actually lived, and often were based on events in the poets own works. Thus, you have to be very careful about any stories about the Greek poets. No reliable contemporary source provides us with any detailed information about the life of Aeschylus, but later sources allow us to piece together an outline. Aeschylus' place of birth was Eleusis, the famous center for the cult of Demeter in Greece; the "mysteries" of Eleusis were rituals designed either to prepare the soul for the afterlife or for eventual reincarnation. Aeschylus was thirty-five years old at the battle of Marathon, one of the two pivotal events in the Greek struggle against the invading Persians.

Aeschylus produced his first plays sometime around 500 B.C.E. for the dramatic competition at the City Dionysian Festival in Athens, which was held annually in early spring. For these competitions Athens would select three poets who would write and stage three tragedies and a comedy known as a satyr play; the tragic poet thus had to aim for the loftiest artistic ideals while still pleasing the crowd and judges, a balancing act Aeschylus performed extremely well. He won his first victory 484 and finished first the other twelve times he competed. Currently, scholars believe that Aeschylus composed 52 plays, of which only seven (perhaps six if Prometheus Bound is unauthentic) survive. The Athenians would only allow a single performance of each play, but following Aeschylus' death, his tragedies were the first to be performed for a second time in the competition. The earliest play we have is his Persians from 472, when he was 53 years old. In other words, we do not know what Aeschylus wrote like as a young man.

Aeschylus, essentially, invented tragic drama as we know it, greatly developing and expanding the fairly primitive art of his predecessors, led by the semi-legendary Thespis. Aeschylus, we are told (Vita Aeschyli 14), was "the first to make tragedy more grand by means of nobler emotions. He decked out the stage and stunned his audience with brilliant visual effects, with paintings and machines, with stage props such as altars and tombs, with trumpets, ghosts, and Furies." It is important to remember that the Athenian tragedians were responsible for all aspects of the production, from the costumes to the music. Aeschylean tragedy is, above all, grand, massive and dignified. The language is heavy and, in the Greek, often difficult to understand, full of compound forms and complex metaphors, and all translators have to insert phrases to make parts of the drama intelligible for modern audiences; if you find Aeschylus difficult to read in English translation, consider that it is infinitely harder in the original Greek! It was Aeschylus who probably invented and certainly favored the trilogic form of three consecutive plays with an overarching plot. The Oresteia is the only surviving trilogy from Athens, in part because Aeschylus' successors rejected this practice, instead producing three separate plays each year. Thus, any reference to Sophocles' "Theban trilogy" is misleading.

The plays of Aeschylus show more than any other playwright's the closeness of drama's relationship to the civic life of Athens. Aeschylus was an adolescent when the Athenians overthrew the tyrant Pisistratid family and established the first democracy, and the fear of tyranny is palpable in his drama Agamemnon. The young Pericles, before he drove Athens to its greatest glory, led the chorus in Aeschylus' production in 468 of Seven Against Thebes, which presented the war over Thebes between the sons of Oedipus, the setting of the Antigone of Sophocles (who was himself Pericles' friend). Moreover, the ancient writer Pausanias wrote that Aeschylus' tombstone made no mention of drama's such as the Oresteia, but proclaimed his participation as a soldier in those famous Athenian military victories against the Persians at Salamis and Marathon which contributed to much to the growth of Athenian confidence and power. Athens returned the favor, since it regarded Aeschylus as one of the main representatives of its Golden Age, before the Peloponnesian War and the teaching of the Sophists had weakened traditional Athenian society.