Aeschylus, Persae (The Persians)

The Persae was 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. It was the second play of a tetralogy, framed by Phineus before it and Glaucus of Potniae after, with the satyr-play Prometheus to close; the connected trilogy did not, so far as can be told, 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.^[1] 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, so distressed the audience that Phrynichus was fined.^[2] 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 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, and 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 structure is austere and processional. A chorus of aged Persian counsellors, left to guard the realm, open with foreboding; the queen mother 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.

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 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^[3]

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 formations, each confirmable in other Greek authors or against the ancient Near Eastern onomastic record.^[4] Authentic as names, they are another matter as men: unlike the commanders of Herodotus's army catalogue, whose names often match known individuals in the Persepolis archives, the persons behind the roll of the doomed mostly cannot be found in the documentary record, and the most recent study of the campaigns counts them as invented.^[5] 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.

Before the news comes, Aeschylus builds the disaster in symbol. The queen mother 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^[6]

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. The queen of the stage is a commanding figure, greeted by the chorus with the obeisance owed to divinity, hailed as "an effulgence like unto the eyes of the gods".^[7] But the play never names her, and her identification as Atossa, Cyrus's daughter and Xerxes' mother, rests on the ancient commentators rather than the text.^[8] How far this dramatic queen answers to the woman of the Persian record, nearly invisible in the Persepolis archive, is a separate question (see Atossa); the queen of the Persae is a Greek imagining, and it is superb dramatic construction worth nothing 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 centre of the play, and its most quoted stretch, is the messenger's report of Salamis.^[9] 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^[9]

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^[9]

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^[9]

The messenger sets the number of Persian ships at 1,207, the very figure Herodotus later gives,^[9][2] and the coincidence is instructive: Herodotus's total may in fact derive from Aeschylus, who describes a fleet of a thousand warships with two hundred and seven of exceptional speed, and 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.^[10][5] The poet's standing as an eyewitness has been urged in the figure's defence, but the King's fleet was rarely concentrated in a single anchorage for anyone to count it, and critical reconstructions now put it nearer six hundred ships, or fewer.^[5]

The report is not all magnification. It tells the losses as particular deaths, the drowned commanders named one by one until the messenger breaks off:

Tharybis, admiral of five times fifty ships, a Lyrnaean by descent, a comely man, lies dead all wretched in uncomeliness. Syennesis, also, the governor of the Cilicians, foremost in courage, he whose single prowess wrought the foe most harm, found there a glorious death. Such were the leaders touching whom I have now made report. Sore as were our losses, yet I announce but few.

Aeschylus, Persae 323-330, trans. Smyth^[11]

And it carries the survivors past the battle into the long dying of the retreat, the remnant of the host caught on the cracking ice of the Strymon in Thrace:

Many a man who ere that had held the gods in no esteem, implored them then in supplication as he worshipped earth and heaven. … One upon another our men sank in, and fortunate indeed was he whose breath of life was sundered soonest.

Aeschylus, Persae 497-508, trans. Smyth^[12]

These are not scenes a triumphalist would invent, and they are part of the ground of the humane reading of the play discussed below. At one point, too, the tragedy and Herodotus positively diverge, and there the tragedy may be the better witness. Aeschylus gives great weight to the fighting on the islet of Psyttaleia in the strait, where a Persian landing-force was cut down, and has the messenger reckon that slaughter a heavier blow than the sea-battle itself; Herodotus reduces the same episode to a minor incident and credits it to Aristeides and his hoplites.^[1] Charles Fornara argued that it is Herodotus's version that is the tendentious one, a pro-hoplite reshaping, and that Aeschylus preserves the event closer to its true scale.^[1] The messenger's Salamis, then, is neither a transcript nor a fabrication. It is the oldest account of the battle, composed to a Greek measure and bent toward the wonder of the few overcoming the many, yet anchored, if its poet indeed stood in the straits as tradition holds, by a first-hand sense of the place, and, at Psyttaleia, arguably more reliable than the prose history that succeeded it.

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, "leader beloved to the men of Susa", a scatheless lord of the bow, while Xerxes is the youth who "disposed all things imprudently".^[13] The ghost names the sin, and it is the characteristic Greek charge of hybris, overreaching that the gods punish. He names it twice over. Once it is the yoking of the Hellespont, the bridge of boats by which Xerxes shackled a sacred strait as though it were a slave:

He conceived the hope that he could by shackles, as if it were a slave, restrain the current of the sacred Hellespont, the Bosporus, a stream divine; set himself to fashion a roadway of a new order, and, by casting upon it hammer-wrought fetters, made a spacious causeway for his mighty host. Mortal though he was, he thought in his folly that he would gain the mastery over all the gods, aye even over Poseidon.

Aeschylus, Persae 745-750, trans. Smyth^[14]

and once it is the sacrilege in Greece itself, the burning of the gods' images and temples:

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^[13]

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 rather than 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, of casting one king as father and another as despot.^[10] The charge of sacrilege had the longest career of all: the picture of the impious despot whose hubris leads through temple-burning to his own downfall and the decadence of his line became, in Amélie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White's phrase, a "Greek-determined view" of Xerxes, and its Babylonian branch has collapsed against the contemporary cuneiform evidence.^[15]

Woven into the ghost's rebuke is a catalogue of Xerxes' royal predecessors, the line from which he is the falling-off. Darius names them in order, and that list has been read both as proof that Aeschylus knew almost nothing of Persian history and as evidence that, rightly understood, he knew a good deal. On the sceptical view the sequence is a muddle betraying a Greek's ignorance; on the reading argued by Denys Page and H. D. Broadhead, and set out in A. F. Garvie's commentary, it is in its essentials consistent both with Herodotus and with Darius's own Behistun inscription.^[1] The first name, Medos, is taken not as a mythical ancestor of the Medes but as the Mede Cyaxares, the first king of a united Media and Persia and so the right person to begin the line; then his son Astyages, then Cyrus, then Cambyses, and then a usurper the play calls Mardos, the Smerdis of Herodotus and the Bardiya of Behistun, before Darius and his six fellow-conspirators end the interregnum and Darius takes the throne. One further line, inserting two extra kings, Maraphis and Artaphrenes, is almost certainly a later interpolation.^[1]

Beyond its accuracy, the catalogue is remarkable for a silence within it. Aeschylus does not say that Mardos was an impostor; he lists him plainly as one of the kings, a disgrace to his line but a king all the same. Edith Hall and Maria Brosius have read that silence as a clue to the greatest problem in early Achaemenid history, whether the man Darius overthrew was truly a magus impersonating the dead prince, as Behistun insists, or the real son of Cyrus, whose killing Darius covered with the story of an impostor.^[1] An Athenian poet writing within living memory of the event, with no stake in Darius's legitimacy, seems not to have heard that the king he calls Mardos was anything but a king, which is at least consistent with the suspicion that the impostor was Darius's own invention. The point cannot be pressed far, resting as it does on the silence of a tragedy, and Stephanie West and others have entered cautions; but it shows how even the play's incidental Persian matter is drawn into the central debates about the dynasty (see Bardiya, the Accession of Darius and the Achaemenid dynasty).^[1]

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^[16]

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 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.^[17][4] The Persae, in her account, is "the earliest testimony to the absolute polarization in Greek thought" of Hellene and barbarian.^[18] The genealogy is direct: Edward Said's own first example of Orientalism, Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg observed, comes from the Persae, some forty years before Herodotus wrote.^[19] 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.^[17] The debate reaches far beyond the play, for the "barbarian" the Persae helped invent is the lens through which almost all Greek writing on Persia was refracted thereafter, Herodotus included, whom, on Victor Parker's argument, the tragedy demonstrably influenced.^[4]

Bound up with the barbarian question is a second and older one, how the play as a whole is meant to be taken, and here the readings sort into three. The oldest, dominant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and given its fullest statement by Gilbert Murray in 1940, reads the Persae as a patriotic celebration: the spectacle of the ridiculous and contemptible barbarian brought low, staged for the pleasure of the democratic victors, with the final scene of Xerxes wailing in his rags as its crudest gratification.^[1] The second, associated above all with Edith Hall and developed by Pericles Georges and Thomas Harrison, keeps the play political but turns celebration into ideology: the Persae is the earliest testimony to the polarisation of Greek and barbarian, and its Persians, luxurious, servile, despotic, given to unbridled lament, are drawn as the negative of the free Athenian male, so that on Harrison's reading there is scarcely room left even for pathos and the play becomes an indictment of Persian monarchy.^[1][17] The third, argued by Broadhead, Garvie, Christopher Pelling and others, holds that the Persae is a tragedy in the fullest sense, its plot built to bring the audience, despite itself, to sympathise with the Persians in their suffering and to recognise them as fellow human beings; the patriotic touches, the great Greek war-cry among them, are real but subordinate to that tragic movement.^[1] Between the second and third stands a mediating reading: Michael Gagarin argues that Aeschylus presents both the Athenian and the Persian perspectives at once, in a way that creates a basic tension or irony throughout, while Attilio Favorini finds in the play a deliberate ambivalence, exultation and mourning accruing together.^[1]

Where the balance now lies is itself contested, which is part of what keeps the play alive. The "inventing the barbarian" reading has been the most influential of the last half-century and has reshaped how the whole of Greek writing on Persia is read; but it has drawn strong objection, Alan Sommerstein resisting the certainty that the Persae is a "racist" play, and Erich Gruen cautioning against reading Greek alterity as harshly as the school requires.^[1][17] What holds the question open is the play's own doubleness. It gives its noblest lines to the enemy, mourns the enemy's dead in the enemy's own city, and does so in a theatre of the men who killed them, at a festival of the victorious city: the sympathy and the triumph are both really present in the text, and no reading has dissolved either without violence to it.

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 the queen dreams, when the ghost of Darius pronounces on hybris, when the chorus laments, the reader is not overhearing the Persian court but 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 and Harrison after him, find in it hardly any authentic information about Achaemenid institutions, as against the genuine residue in the names, the arms, and the salvageable line of kings.^[4] 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 the shape one Athenian gave it for an Athenian audience in 472 BCE.

The Persae had two ancient lives and a long modern one. Its first was the prize-winning Athenian production of 472. Its second was in Sicily. The ancient Life of Aeschylus records that Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, invited the poet to restage the Persae at his court, and there is no strong reason to doubt it, for Aeschylus wrote and produced other work for Hieron and died at Gela in Sicily in 456/5.^[1] One suggestion is that the invitation grew out of the way the Sicilian Greeks synchronised their own victory over Carthage at Himera with Salamis, treating the two as a single deliverance of Hellas east and west.^[1]

The Syracusan restaging carries a genuine puzzle, for a strand of ancient scholarship held that two versions of the play existed. A scholion on Aristophanes' Frogs, reporting the later scholars Herodicus and Didymus, says that one version, now lost, carried the battle of Plataea, and that this was the version Eratosthenes assigned to the Syracusan production; Aristophanes himself, staging the Frogs in 405, appears to recall a Persae in which the death of Darius was announced and the chorus clapped, neither of which happens in the text that survives.^[1] Whether Aeschylus revised the play for Sicily, and how much of any such revision has bled into the received text, is unsettled, and several of the standing difficulties in the play's structure have been laid at its door.^[1]

The afterlife proper turned on the play's survival through the medieval manuscript tradition of Aeschylus, of whose some ninety plays only seven are extant; the Persae is one of the three, with the Seven against Thebes and the Prometheus Bound, that carry ancient scholia. It was read and copied precisely for its subject, the confrontation of Europe and Asia, and that subject has given it a modern reception out of proportion to its difficulty on the stage: it has been revived and adapted from the Greek War of Independence to the present, far more often for its contemporary resonance, the lament of a defeated power, the hubris of empire, the cost paid by the enemy's dead, than for anything it records of 480.^[4]