In this blog post, we will examine Aeschylus’s life, his works, and the ways in which he adapted mythology into tragedy.
The Life of Aeschylus
Aeschylus was born in 525/524 BCE in the Attic demus of Eleusis, the son of Euphorion. He grew up during a turbulent period when tyranny collapsed in Athens and the city transitioned to democracy. After the tyrant Hippias was exiled in 510 BC, Cleisthenes laid the foundations of democracy through various reforms, such as the reorganization of administrative districts and the introduction of the ostracism law. These efforts were an attempt to embody the spirit of isonomia, which emphasized equal political rights for all citizens.
Another major event in Aeschylus’s life was the Persian Wars. Athens and its allied city-states fought and won a battle to defend their freedom against the Persian Empire; among these victories, he is said to have participated in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC and the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC.
As a tragic poet and political thinker, Aeschylus associated with the lyric poet Pindar and the tragic poets Cyril and Sophocles. He visited the colonial cities established in Sicily and interacted with the local elites there; in particular, he traveled twice at the invitation of Hiero I of Syracuse. During his first visit in 476/475 BC, he staged ‘The Women of Aetna’ to celebrate the founding of the city-state of Aetna, and during his second visit, he restaged ‘The Persians’, which had been performed in 472 BC.
After staging the Oresteia trilogy in 458 BC, he visited Sicily again and eventually died in Gela in 456/455 BC. Surprisingly, his epitaph does not refer to him as the “great tragic poet” but merely notes his participation in the Battle of Marathon, indicating that he was also remembered for his political and military activities.
Aeschylus made his official debut as a tragedian in 499/498 BC and won his first tragedy competition in 484 BC, fifteen years after his debut. This was a somewhat late achievement compared to Sophocles, who won in his twenties. According to one account, he is said to have participated in the tragedy competition at the Great Dionysia 19 times and won 13 times. After his death, his tragedies were sometimes re-entered into the competition against the works of living playwrights, in accordance with a resolution by the city-state.
His creative output was vast; he is believed to have written approximately 70 to 90 plays, and the most persuasive hypothesis is that about 78 of these are his works. A total of seven works have survived to the present day; aside from the Oresteia trilogy, these include ‘The Persians’ (472 BCE), ‘The Suppliants’, ‘The Seven Against Thebes’ (467 BCE), and ‘Prometheus Bound’. However, the argument that ‘Prometheus Bound’ is not by Aeschylus is gaining traction.
Aeschylus, who was active in the first half of the 5th century BCE, introduced the thematically cohesive trilogy format in several of his works. This format was well-suited for comprehensively addressing grand themes such as cosmic conflicts and struggles among the gods, family curses and their fulfillment, national crises and the downfall of royal houses, and the establishment of new civilizational systems. The Oresteia trilogy is the only complete trilogy that has survived to this day and is considered a classic example of a tragic trilogy. Meanwhile, while some works belonging to the “Theban trilogy” and the “trilogy of the Daughters of Danaos” have survived, most of the other works in these trilogies have been lost.
The Oresteia and the Dramatization of Myth
Greek tragedy was an art form that dramatized traditional myths for the stage and performed them during theatrical festivals. Here, “traditional myths” refer to the myths transmitted through epic and lyric poetry before the emergence of the tragic genre—that is, before the late 6th century BCE. Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’, along with other epic poems, served as the primary sources from which tragic poets drew their material.
Homer’s epics, in particular, exerted a profound influence on the tragic genre, and he was regarded as so important that he was called the “Father of Tragedy.” For example, the ‘Iliad’ does not cover the entire Trojan War; instead, it condenses the event of Achilles’ wrath, which occurred in the tenth year of the campaign, to clearly construct dramatic tension and characterization. In terms of the structure of dramatic events and characterization, the tragic poets learned much from Homer.
However, tragic poets often drew upon stories from the epic tradition that were relatively less complete or less polished than those of Homer, adapting them for the stage. These less standardized narratives offered greater scope for developing tragic plots, allowing authors to reconstruct them and shift emphases to suit their own theatrical and political objectives.
Tragic poets reused the material of traditional myths without undermining their core essence. Specifically, they adapted the stories for the stage by compressing or expanding the temporal structure of events, highlighting specific moments, and reinterpreting characters’ motivations or personalities. In doing so, they preserved the central meaning of the original myths while transforming them into works that appealed more directly to the demands of performance and the concerns of the community.
