Aeschylus

B

The Suppliants

The Suppliants is a drama about the 50 daughters of Danaüs who fled from Egypt rather than marry their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus, and sought refuge at Árgos. The 50 young women are the suppliants who ask for protection from the king of Árgos, who consults his people. Although the play has little action, it has many passages of great beauty for the chorus, which represents the suppliants. The Suppliants is believed to be the first play of a trilogy that included the lost plays The Egyptians and The Danaïds.

C

The Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound

The Seven Against Thebes, produced in 467 bc, is based on a Theban legend concerning the conflict between the two sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, for the throne of Thebes (see Seven Against Thebes). It is believed to be the third play of a trilogy, the first two being Laius and Oedipus.

Prometheus Bound, a work of uncertain date, portrays the punishment of Prometheus for his theft of fire and his defiance of Zeus. For his actions Prometheus is bound to a rock and tortured. Prometheus Bound is probably the first play of a Promethean trilogy, the others being Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer.

D

The Oresteia

The Oresteia, or story of Orestes, consists of the three tragedies Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. It was first produced in 458 bc. This trilogy studies the operation of the curse that had been placed on the house of Atreus after Atreus, the son of Pelops, had quarreled with his brother Thyestes, killed Thyestes’ children, and served them to Thyestes at a grim banquet. The curse that Thyestes placed on Atreus descended to his son Agamemnon. In order for Agamemnon to sail to Troy to fight in the Trojan War, he had to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia, to appease (satisfy) the goddess Artemis. For this crime his wife, Clytemnestra, never forgave Agamemnon. During his absence she took a lover, Aegisthus, the son of Thyestes, with whom she plotted revenge on Agamemnon. After ten years of war, Troy fell and the Greeks returned home.

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Agamemnon, one of the greatest works of dramatic literature, opens with the return of King Agamemnon from the Trojan War and his murder by his faithless wife Clytemnestra. When Agamemnon appears, accompanied by his Trojan slave and mistress Cassandra, he is welcomed into the palace by Clytemnestra but is then slain in his bath. Cassandra shares his fate. After the murders Aegisthus appears and announces that he and Clytemnestra have taken over the royal power. The chorus of elders, still loyal to Agamemnon, protests in vain and hints at possible retribution when Agamemnon’s son Orestes comes of age.

The Libation-Bearers, or Choephoroe, tells of the return of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon. Orestes had been smuggled out of the palace at the time of his father’s murder and has spent years in exile. At the command of the god Apollo, Orestes comes secretly to Árgos to avenge his father. With the help of his sister Electra, Orestes enters the palace, slays Aegisthus, and finally murders his own mother. After this deed he is attacked by the avenging goddesses, the Erinyes or Furies. Orestes flees to seek Apollo’s help.

The Eumenides deals with the sufferings and final atonement of Orestes. Pursued by the Erinyes, who form the chorus, Orestes, goes to Athens on the advice of Apollo. There he is tried in a special court convened on the Areopagus and presided over by the goddess Athena. Defended by Apollo, Orestes is acquitted by Athena’s vote when the human jury is unable to reach a verdict. In this way the curse on the house of Atreus is laid to rest. The Erinyes are outraged at the verdict, but are soothed by Athena, who persuades them to turn over their rights to dispense justice to the god Zeus and to settle in Athens as beneficial earth-spirits.

IV

Aeschylus’s Dramatic Technique

Aeschylus wrote his plays during a period that was of great importance in the development of Greek tragedy. When Aeschylus started to write, in about 490 bc, tragedy was mainly a spoken or sung performance by the chorus. Choral odes were sparingly interspersed with a few spoken remarks by the leader of the chorus and a single actor, who might play more than one role. Aeschylus added a second actor. This innovation—the second actor—was of great dramatic significance because for the first time it made possible the use of dialogue and dramatic conflict without the participation of the chorus.

Aeschylus’s early plays, including The Persians and The Suppliants, depend mostly on the chorus. The Suppliants, in fact, contains only one short episode in which two characters on the stage converse with each other; elsewhere, the actors converse only with the chorus. By the end of his career Aeschylus had learned to manipulate two or three characters with ease. In the Oresteia, although the choral odes are still long, the main action and the development of the plot take place in spoken dialogue.

The plot construction of Aeschylus is relatively simple. The main character finds himself in a situation dictated by some divine power, and this situation rarely changes before the final catastrophe. The hero, once resolved on a course of action, pursues it with undivided purpose to the end. The inner conflict, which looms so large in the psychological drama of Euripides, is rare in Aeschylus. Even Orestes, about to slay his mother at the command of Apollo, hesitates for only a moment.

A few simple episodes, in Aeschylus’s tragedies, create suspense and pile up details leading to the catastrophe. Woven in with the episodes, the choral odes set a magnificent background. They carry forward the plot, create a mood of brooding suspense and horror, and hint at the moral law that operates in the action. The fortunes of the chorus are always involved in the action, and the chorus shares in some way in the final outcome. Thus, Aeschylus used the chorus as an additional actor, not as a commentator on the action.

Aeschylus’s characters are powerfully drawn with a few broad strokes. Especially noteworthy are Eteocles in The Seven Against Thebes and Clytemnestra in Agamemnon. Eteocles is a noble and loyal king, who partly through devotion to his country brings ruin on himself and his family. He has been called the first tragic hero, as defined by Aristotle, in European drama. Clytemnestra has often been compared with the character of Lady Macbeth in the play by William Shakespeare (see Macbeth). Possessed of an iron will and unwavering determination and filled with a blind fury that drives her on to the murder of her husband, Clytemnestra dominates every scene of Agamemnon in which she appears.

V

Aeschylus’s Thought

Many scholars believe that the greatest achievement of Aeschylus was his sophisticated religious and moral thinking. Starting from the anthropomorphic polytheism of the Greeks, he progressed to the concept of a single supreme deity—Zeus. In his earliest play Aeschylus invokes Zeus as “King of kings, happiest and most perfect of the divine powers,” and in The Eumenides he presents Zeus as an all-wise, all-powerful deity who unites in himself justice and equity, along with the functions of a personal god and the inexorable operations of an impersonal fate.

To this conception of Zeus, Prometheus Bound offers at first sight a startling contrast. In this tragedy Zeus is pictured by Prometheus, Io, and the chorus as a harsh tyrant, powerful but not omniscient, and bound by the laws of an iron fate to which even he must submit. Prometheus Bound is, however, the first of three plays on this subject; in the last two plays of the trilogy, Aeschylus doubtless worked out some solution to the theological problem he raised. Some scholars have suggested that Aeschylus believed in some sort of divine evolution, whereby the government of the universe had progressively improved.

In Aeschylus’s thought the divine government of the universe extends also to the realm of human morality. In mythological terms Justice is the daughter of Zeus. Thus, human sins and transgressions (wrong actions) are inevitably punished by divine power. The action of this power is not simply retribution for overabundant human prosperity, as some of Aeschylus’s contemporaries believed. For Aeschylus, wealth properly used brings no ruin in its train. But mortals who are too prosperous tend toward blind folly or infatuation, which leads to sin or presumption (hubris), and this in turn leads to divine punishment and ruin.

Often the consequences of sin are conceived of as hereditary, lurking in a family in the form or an inherited curse. Yet Aeschylus clearly indicates that each new generation commits its own sin, which sets the inherited curse into operation. At the same time, the punishment sent by Zeus is no mere blind and savage retribution for sin. The law of Zeus is that humans shall learn by suffering, and that their suffering serves a positive, moral purpose.