Book description
Aeschylus (525-456 BC) brought a new grandeur and epic sweep to the
drama of classical Athens, raising it to the status of high art.
The Persians
, the only Greek tragedy to deal with events from recent Athenian
history, depicts the final defeat of Persia in the battle of Salamis,
through the eyes of the Persian court of King Xerxes, becoming a tragic
lesson in tyranny. In Prometheus Bound,
the defiant Titan Prometheus is brutally punished by Zeus for daring to
improve the state of wretchedness and servitude in which mankind is
kept. Seven Against Thebes
shows the inexorable downfall of the last members of the cursed family
of Oedipus, while The Suppliants
relates the pursuit of the fifty daughters of Danaus by the fifty sons
of Aegyptus, and their final rescue by a heroic king.
Aeschylus
(born at Eleusis, near Athens, c. 525 BC; died at gela, Sicily, 456
BC) was the dramatist who first made Athenian tragedy one of the
world's great art forms, though in his epitaph he preferred that he
should be remembered as one of those who fought the Persians at
Marathon. Although he is said to have written over eighty plays, only
seven have survived.
Alan H. Sommerstein has been Professor of Greek at the University of
Nottingham since 1988. He has written or edited more than thirty books
on Ancient Greek language and literature, especially tragic and comic
drama, including Aeschylean Tragedy (1996), Greek Drama and
Dramatists (2002), and a complete edition of the comedies of
Aristophanes with translation and commentary (1980-2003).
