Aeschylus, Persae (The Persians)

The Persae, "The Persians", is a tragedy by Aeschylus, produced at the Athenian festival of the Great Dionysia in the spring of 472 BCE, eight years after the sea-battle at Salamis whose aftermath it dramatises. Two facts make it extraordinary for the study of the Achaemenid Empire. It is the earliest surviving account of any Persian event by a contemporary, earlier than Herodotus by two generations and earlier than every other narrative in Greek. And it is the only Greek tragedy on a historical, rather than a mythological, subject that has come down to us complete. The poet who wrote it had, by the ancient tradition, fought in the very war he staged: Aeschylus is said to have stood in the ranks at Marathon in 490, where his brother Cynegirus fell, and quite possibly at Salamis itself. His audience in the theatre of Dionysus included men who had pulled an oar in the straits. What they watched was not their own triumph shown directly, but its mirror-image: the catastrophe told from the losing side, in the palace at Xerxes' own Susa, as the grief of the Persian queen, the Persian elders, the ghost of the dead king Darius, and at last the broken king himself. That inversion is the whole art of the play, and the whole difficulty of using it as evidence.

The play and its occasion

The Persae was the second play of a tetralogy, framed by Phineus before it and Glaucus of Potniae after, with the satyr-play Prometheus the Fire-Kindler to close; the connected trilogy did not, so far as we can tell, share a single story, and the Persae stands on its own. It won first prize. The production was financed as a public choregia by a young Athenian named Pericles, a detail preserved in the surviving production-notice (the hypothesis) and among the earliest firm facts about the statesman. The subject was not new to the Athenian stage: about 476 BCE the older tragedian Phrynichus had staged a Phoenician Women on the same victory, and earlier still a Capture of Miletus on the Ionian disaster of 494 that, Herodotus reports (6.21), so distressed the audience that Phrynichus was fined. Aeschylus took up a theme the theatre had already found could move a democratic audience to its depths, and gave it its lasting form.

The structure is austere and processional. A chorus of aged Persian counsellors, left to guard the realm, open with foreboding; the queen mother Atossa enters and tells a dream of ill omen; a messenger arrives with the news of Salamis; the ghost of Darius is raised from his tomb to pronounce judgement; and Xerxes returns at last in torn robes to lead, with the chorus, a long closing lament. There is no scene-change, no Greek character on stage, and almost no action: the battle is reported, not shown. The play is, in effect, one prolonged act of mourning for the enemy, watched by the enemy's conquerors.

The earliest source, and a fixed date

The value of the Persae as evidence begins with its date. It was produced in the archonship of Menon, in 472 BCE, a date the production-records fix securely, so that it stands eight years after Salamis and within the lifetime of nearly everyone who had fought there. Every other narrative source for the Persian Wars, and for the Achaemenid Empire as a whole, is later: Herodotus wrote his prose inquiry in the 440s to 420s, two generations on; Xenophon, Ctesias and the rest later still. This makes the Persae the earliest surviving Greek account of any Achaemenid event, and the earliest datable literary response to the wars from a participant's generation. That primacy is a double-edged asset. It means the play preserves an image of Persia formed before the great prose traditions hardened, and before the stereotype had its full literary elaboration; but it also means the stereotype's own beginnings are visible in it, for the Persae is not a neutral report that later writers distorted, but itself one of the first and most powerful shapers of the Greek picture of Persia. When Herodotus and those after him drew the King and his court, they drew, in part, after Aeschylus.

The catalogue of names

The Persae opens, like the Iliad it deliberately echoes, with a catalogue: the chorus names the Persian commanders who marched west with the host. It is a roll of the doomed, and it is one of the most historically interesting things in the play, because the names are, in the main, real.

"Such are Amistres and Artaphrenes and Megabates and Astaspes, marshals of the Persians; kings themselves, yet vassals of the Great King, they press on, commanders of an enormous host, skilled in archery and horsemanship, formidable to look upon and fearful in battle through the valiant resolve of their souls." (Aeschylus, Persae 21-28, trans. Smyth)^[1]

The list runs on through Artembares and Masistres, Imaeus and Pharandaces, and the contingents drawn from as far as Egypt and Memphis. Not every name can be matched to a known individual, and some are Greek-shaped or invented for the metre; but the philologist Rüdiger Schmitt, examining them, found that the Iranian names in the Persae are for the most part authentic, each confirmable in other Greek authors or against the ancient Near Eastern onomastic record (Schmitt 1978, cited in the Companion).^[2] The weapons the play gives the Persians, the bow above all, correspond to the arms the Achaemenid army actually used. Here, at the level of nouns rather than narrative, the tragedy touches something real.

Atossa's dream and the two women

Before the news comes, Aeschylus builds the disaster in symbol. The queen Atossa, mother of Xerxes and daughter of Cyrus, describes a dream in which her son tries to yoke two women to his chariot:

"As for the lands in which they dwelt, to one had been assigned by lot the land of Hellas, to the other that of the barbarians... The one bore herself proudly in these trappings and kept her mouth obedient to the rein. The other struggled and with her hands tore apart the harness of the car; then, free of the curb, she dragged it violently along with her and snapped the yoke in two. My son was hurled to the ground." (Aeschylus, Persae 181-196, trans. Smyth)^[3]

The image is pure Greek ideology in Persian dress: Hellas is the woman who will not be yoked, freedom against the bridle of the Great King, and the fall of Xerxes is foretold in his own mother's sleep. It is a superb piece of dramatic construction and worth nothing at all as a record of anything a Persian queen thought or said. The tragedy repeatedly does this: it puts a Greek understanding of the war into Persian mouths, so that the enemy is made to confess, in advance, the justice of his own defeat.

The messenger and the battle of Salamis

The centre of the play, and its most quoted stretch, is the messenger's report of Salamis (lines 353-432). It is the earliest description of the battle in existence, and much of what the whole later tradition believed about that day, the night manoeuvre, the trap in the narrows, the King watching from the shore, goes back to it. Aeschylus already has the Persians lured into the straits by a false message from a Greek, so that the defeat begins as a stratagem the gods permitted:

"My Queen, some destructive power or evil spirit, appearing from somewhere or other, caused the beginning of our utter rout. A Hellene, from the Athenian host, came to your son Xerxes and told this tale: that, when the gloom of black night should set in, the Hellenes would not remain in place, but, springing upon the rowing benches of their ships, would seek, some here, some there, to preserve their lives by stealthy flight." (Aeschylus, Persae 353-360, trans. Smyth)^[4]

Then comes the dawn, the Greek paean, and the shout that Athens plainly loved to hear repeated, the cry of free men fighting for their own:

"On, you men of Hellas! Free your native land. Free your children, your wives, the temples of your fathers' gods, and the tombs of your ancestors. Now you are fighting for all you have." (Aeschylus, Persae 402-405, trans. Smyth)^[4]

The fighting is told as the crowding and wreck of the King's superior fleet in the narrows, and it ends in a picture of pitiless slaughter in the water:

"But, as if our men were tuna or some haul of fish, the foe kept striking and hacking them with broken oars and fragments of wrecked ships. Groans and shrieks together filled the open sea." (Aeschylus, Persae 424-426, trans. Smyth)^[4]

The messenger sets the number of Persian ships at 1,207 (lines 341-343), the very figure Herodotus later gives (7.89), and the coincidence is instructive: the round total probably descends from the Homeric Catalogue of Ships rather than from any Persian muster-roll, so that even the statistics of the tragedy serve the epic magnification of the victory (Briant 2002).^[5] The messenger's Salamis is a work of great vividness and real topographical sense, but it is composed to a Greek measure, and its business is the wonder of the few overcoming the many.

The ghost of Darius and the meaning of the defeat

Aeschylus explains the disaster through a contrast that would shape the entire later image of the dynasty: the good father Darius against the rash son Xerxes. Darius is raised from his tomb to deliver the play's moral, and the chorus recalls him as the King under whom nothing was lost, "ruler of archers", the beloved lord of Susa (555-56), while Xerxes is the youth who "disposed all things imprudently". The ghost names the sin, and it is the characteristic Greek charge of hybris, overreaching that the gods punish:

"For, on reaching the land of Hellas, restrained by no religious awe, they ravaged the images of the gods and set fire to their temples... For presumptuous pride, when it has matured, bears as its fruit a crop of calamity, from which it reaps an abundant harvest of tears." (Aeschylus, Persae 809-822, trans. Smyth)^[6]

Darius foretells the coming ruin at Plataea under "the Dorian lance", and closes with the lesson "that mortal man should not vaunt himself excessively". This is Greek tragic theology, not Persian dynastic thought: the wise dead king who denounces his own living son, the bridging of the Hellespont and the digging of Athos read as impiety against the natural order, Zeus as the chastiser of pride. The historical Darius, whose own inscriptions carve a very different self-image, would not have recognised the figure on the Athenian stage; the contrast with Xerxes, as it happens, mirrors the Greek habit (already in Herodotus 3.89) of casting one king as father and another as despot (Briant 2002).^[5]

Xerxes in rags: the closing lament

The play ends with the return of Xerxes himself, not in triumph but in ruin, his royal robes torn, to lead an antiphonal dirge with the chorus that fills the last several hundred lines. The Great King of the largest empire on earth is shown on the Athenian stage weeping, calling on his counsellors to weep with him:

"Weep, weep over our calamity, and depart to your homes... Cry aloud now in response to me... Cry out, tuning your strain to mine." (Aeschylus, Persae 1038-1043, trans. Smyth)^[7]

The spectacle of the enemy king brought low, made to perform his own grief for the pleasure and instruction of the men who beat him, is the emotional pay-off of the whole design. It is magnificent theatre and, read as history, a warning: what the Persae offers is never the Persian experience of 480, but an Athenian imagining of it, staged so that the victors might contemplate their victory in the safest and most flattering of mirrors, the tears of the vanquished.

The invention of the barbarian

The Persae has a further and larger place in the study of Persia: it is a founding document of the Greek idea of the "barbarian". In her influential study Inventing the Barbarian (1989), Edith Hall argued that Athenian tragedy, and this play at its head, created the polarity of Greek and barbarian as a defining opposition, the barbarian on stage presented as the inverse of the free citizen male, and so began an "orientalist" discourse that runs from antiquity into the modern world (Hall 1989, cited in Morgan 2016 and the Companion).^[8][2] The Persae supplies the type in almost pure form: the despotic monarch, the servile subjects who prostrate themselves, the luxury and the emotional excess, the empire of Asia set against the freedom of Hellas. Later scholarship has both extended and qualified this reading. Studies by Cartledge, Georges, Harrison and others pressed the alterity thesis further; but Hall herself, in "Recasting the Barbarian" (2006), revised her view to allow more for the complexity of the phenomenon and the tendency of drama simply to "revel in exoticism and spectacle", and Erich Gruen and others have cautioned that modern readings may have leaned too hard on alterity at the expense of the tangled symbolism actually present (Morgan 2016, pp. 129).^[8] The debate matters for this compendium because the "barbarian" the Persae helped invent is the lens through which almost all Greek writing on Persia was refracted thereafter, Herodotus included, whom the tragedy demonstrably influenced (Parker 2007, cited in the Companion).^[2]

The Persians speak Greek

The single fact to hold onto is that every Persian in the Persae is an Athenian invention speaking Attic Greek to an Athenian crowd. When Atossa dreams, when the ghost of Darius pronounces on hybris, when the chorus laments, we are not overhearing the Persian court; we are watching Athens ventriloquise it. The court of the play is an interpretatio graeca, and scholars who have examined it closely (Broadhead in his standard commentary of 1960, Harrison 2000) find in it hardly any authentic information about Achaemenid institutions, as against the genuine residue in the names and the arms (Broadhead 1960; Harrison 2000, cited in the Companion).^[2] The Persians of Aeschylus grieve in the categories of Greek religion, reason in the categories of Greek ethics, and confess the meaning of the war as a Greek would assign it. This is not a defect of the play, which is a masterpiece of exactly this projection; it is the condition under which the play can be used at all. What it records with authority is not Persia, but how one Athenian, in 472 BCE, wished Persia to be seen.

Text, translation, and survival

The Persae survived antiquity through the medieval manuscript tradition of Aeschylus, of whose some ninety plays only seven are extant, and it is among the three (with the Seven against Thebes and the Suppliants) that carry ancient scholia. It was frequently read and quoted, precisely because of its subject: the confrontation of Europe and Asia gave it a long afterlife, revived and adapted from the Greek War of Independence to the present, more often for its contemporary resonance than for its historical context (Grethlein 2007, cited in the Companion).^[2] The verbatim quotations in this entry follow the public-domain English of Herbert Weir Smyth's 1926 Loeb Classical Library translation, the rendering this compendium uses for Aeschylus and cites by line number; Smyth is close and serviceable, though not to be pressed for the fine texture of the Greek lyric, and the line-numbering follows the standard editions.