Four Plays of Aeschylus

INTRODUCTION

The surviving dramas of Aeschylus are seven in number, though he is believed tohave written nearly a hundred during his life of sixty-nine years, from 525B.C. to 456 B.C. That he fought at Marathon in 490, and at Salamis in 480 B.C.is a strongly accredited tradition, rendered almost certain by the vividreferences to both battles in his play of The Persians, which wasproduced in 472. But his earliest extant play was, probably, not ThePersians but The Suppliant Maidens—a mythical drama, the fameof which has been largely eclipsed by the historic interest of ThePersians, and is undoubtedly the least known and least regarded of theseven. Its topic—the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt toArgos, in order to escape from a forced bridal with their first-cousins, thesons of Aegyptus—is legendary, and the lyric element predominates in theplay as a whole. We must keep ourselves reminded that the ancient Atheniancustom of presenting dramas in Trilogies—that is, in threeconsecutive plays dealing with different stages of one legend—wasprobably not uniform: it survives, for us, in one instance only, viz. theOrestean Trilogy, comprising the Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers,and the Eumenides, or Furies. This Trilogy is the masterpiece ofthe Aeschylean Drama: the four remaining plays of the poet, which aretranslated in this volume, are all fragments of lost Trilogies—that is tosay, the plays are complete as poems, but in regard to the poet’slarger design they are fragments; they once had predecessors, or sequels, ofwhich only a few words, or lines, or short paragraphs, survive. It is notcertain, but seems probable, that the earliest of these single completed playsis The Suppliant Maidens, and on that supposition it has been placedfirst in the present volume. The maidens, accompanied by their father Danaes,have fled from Egypt and arrived at Argos, to take sanctuary there and to avoidcapture by their pursuing kinsmen and suitors. In the course of the play, thepursuers’ ship arrives to reclaim the maidens for a forced wedlock inEgypt. The action of the drama turns on the attitude of the king and people ofArgos, in view of this intended abduction. The king puts the question to thepopular vote, and the demand of the suitors is unanimously rejected: the playcloses with thanks and gratitude on the part of the fugitives, who, in lyricalstrains of quiet beauty, seem to refer the whole question of their marriage tothe subsequent decision of the gods, and, in particular, of Aphrodite.

Of the second portion of the Trilogy we can only speak conjecturally. There

BU KİTABI OKUMAK İÇİN ÜYE OLUN VEYA GİRİŞ YAPIN!

Sitemize Üyelik ÜCRETSİZDİR!