“The Persians” by Aeschylus

[All excerpts quoted taken from the translation by Michael Ewans, published by Everyman]

The tragedies that have survived from Ancient Athens all have mythological themes – all except one, that is: The Persians, now believed the be the earliest of these tragedies (and, hence, the earliest surviving play from any culture, anywhere in the world) deals with a historic event. And very recent history, at that: the play depicts the aftermath of the Battle of Salamis, which had taken place only eight years earlier, and where the invading Persian forces, led by their king Xerxes, were defeated by the much smaller Greek forces. Whether this focus on recent history rather than on mythology makes The Persians unusual among Greek tragedies is difficult to say, given how few of them have survived; but it certainly makes it unique among existing tragic dramas.

Not surprisingly, we need to adjust our modern expectations of drama quite considerably. There is no confrontation: the action of the play – if it may be called “action” – seems, to modern expectations at any rate, static. It consists of the chorus grieving. And of the Persian queen Atossa, also grieving. The ghost of the previous Persian king, Dareios (I am using the spellings as used in Michael Ewans’ translation) then appears, and he too is grieving. And finally, King Xerxes himself appears. And he also grieves. This is not what a modern audience expects from drama.

And yet, in one sense at least, it is surprisingly modern. The main events of the drama – at least in the sense that all that we see and hear is a reaction to it – is the Battle of Salamis, and the subsequent destruction of the Persian army; and not only does this happened offstage, it has happened before the action of this play begins. So we don’t see any of this in the play; what we see instead are the characters’ reactions to all this, and their understanding, or their coming to an understanding, of what it all signifies. We are all used to this sort of thing nowadays: many of Ibsen’s plays – Ghosts, for instance, or Rosmersholm – are similarly structured, in that most of the events of the story have already taken place before the rise of the curtain. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is some three hours and more of four people endlessly brooding on past events. This kind of structure draws the focus of the drama away from the events themselves, and to the characters’ growing understanding of these events, and of what they signify. Such a concept of drama may seem quite modern to us, but here it is, right here, in the earliest play we know of.

If the play appears to us somewhat unrelieved in tone, that clearly is Aeschylus’ intention. It would have been perfectly natural say, to have presented the chorus initially as optimistic and bullish, and then to have dashed this tone with the messenger’s narration, thus achieving a theatrically effective reversal. But Aeschylus eschews this: the chorus is apprehensive from the beginning:

But will the king come back

and will his teeming army?

I am disturbed

By premonitions of disaster.

The Queen, King Xerxes’ mother, then enters, and she offers no relief to this sense of foreboding; instead, she intensifies it by narrating an ominous dream of hers. Quite clearly, unity of tone, even perhaps uniformity of tone, was more important to Aeschylus than any sense of contrast or of reversal.

The messenger’s four long speeches narrate the disasters, but rather interestingly, while the names of the Persian lords are listed, those of the Greeks are not:  presumably, this is because it is not the Greeks who are the focus of this drama. The focus is on those who suffered. The Greeks, whom Aeschylus could easily have named had his primary intention been to celebrate their heroism and their triumph, remain an almost impersonal, and certainly nameless force. Indeed, in the last of the four speeches of the messenger, it’s not even the Greeks who defeat the Persians, but, rather, the forces of nature; or, what is perhaps much the same thing, the gods. Many, we are told, “died from thirst and hunger”.  And then the final disaster, where the ice on the frozen River Strymon cracks, and drowns the soldiers:

… That night, some god

aroused unseasonable winter weather, so the stream

of sacred Strymon froze right over; soldiers who before

that time believed the gods are nothing then began

to pray, prostrate before the earth and sky.

After the troops called out repeatedly the gods

they went across the icy frozen stream.

But the belated prayers to the gods do not save them: soon, “the sun-god sprayed his rays”, melting the ice, and drowning those who were upon it. Throughout this final narration, it’s the gods, not the Greeks, who bring disaster upon the Persians. Queen Atossa says this directly immediately after the messenger’s narration:

Terrible god, your foot has crushed

The whole race of the Persians.

But why do the gods visit so terrible a fate upon the Persians? In the next scene, the ghost of Dareios, Xerxes’ father, appears. Xerxes had been guilty of hubris, of reaching for more than the gods will allow. Dareios is horrified to hear that his son had bridged the Hellespont with ships. “Some daimon,” says the queen, was “partner to his will”; “a daimon great enough to warp his mind,” the ghost of Dareios responds.

Aeschylus is playing as fast and loose with history here as he does with mythology in his other plays, adapting what is given to his dramatic needs: for Dareios himself had, in his life, bridged the same Hellespont. But the dramatic need here is to present Xerxes as over-reaching, his mind warped by a daimon, while Dareios himself, for the sake of contrast, is presented as having been prudent. This, I think, is the heart of the drama: Xerxes had over-reached; he had flouted the will of Zeus; and for this, he is punished. Given the very structure of this drama, the point is not so much what happened, but why it happened.

Xerxes himself, who had through his hubris brought this disaster upon his people, enters in the final scene, a broken man. Once again, Aeschylus defies our expectations: one might have expected an exchange between Xerxes and his mother, the queen, but Aeschylus has the Queen Atossa leave before her son enters: the relationship between Atossa and Xerxes is not the point; the point is the punishment the gods inflict for hubris, and the immense suffering entailed.

***

The Persians is not an easy play for those us accustomed to modern expectations of drama. It appears as a series of tableaux depicting defeat and lamentation; what variety there exists comes from depictions of different aspects of that defeat, and what drama there is comes from the characters coming to an understanding of why this terrible fate has been visited upon them. We may find it lacking in just about everything we nowadays think of as dramatic; but it is clearly, I think, what Aeschylus had intended.

[See here for Amateur Reader’s post on The Persians.]