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Summary
Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Aeschylus's The Persians. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
The Persians: Introduction
A concise biography of Aeschylus plus historical and literary context for The Persians.
The Persians: Plot Summary
A quick-reference summary: The Persians on a single page.
The Persians: Detailed Summary & Analysis
In-depth summary and analysis of every of The Persians. Visual theme-tracking, too.
The Persians: Themes
Explanations, analysis, and visualizations of The Persians's themes.
The Persians: Quotes
The Persians's important quotes, sortable by theme, character, or .
The Persians: Characters
Description, analysis, and timelines for The Persians's characters.
The Persians: Terms
Description, analysis, and timelines for The Persians's terms.
The Persians: Symbols
Explanations of The Persians's symbols, and tracking of where they appear.
The Persians: Theme Wheel
An interactive data visualization of The Persians's plot and themes.
Brief Biography of Aeschylus
Aeschylus was born to a wealthy family in the suburbs of Athens, the artistic and political capital of Ancient Greece. After a brief stint working in a vineyard, Aeschylus turned to life as a dramatist, writing plays and submitting them to Athens’s “Great Dionysia,” the city’s annual theatrical competition. Aeschylus’s focus on playwrighting was interrupted, however, by conflict with the Persians. He fought as a Greek solider first in the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) and then at the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE), a fight that would later form the core narrative of The Persians itself. In between the wars, Aeschylus continued writing, winning his first “Great Dionysia” competition and establishing himself as Athens’s foremost dramatist. All in all, Aeschylus would go on to write between 70 and 90 plays (including the three dramas known collectively as The Oresteia), though only seven of these have survived to today. But despite his status as one of the most important playwrights in antiquity, Aeschylus’s gravestone references only his participation in the Persian wars, a testament to just how profoundly those battles shaped him—and to his identity, above all else, as a proud Greek soldier and patriot.
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Historical Context of The Persians
Aeschylus’s play focuses on the Persian loss to the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis, a battle Aeschylus himself had fought in (on the Greek side) only eight years earlier. Salamis marked a huge victory for the Greeks, especially because the Athenians had already fended off Persian invaders 10 years earlier at the Battle of Marathon. But prior to the turning point at Marathon, the Persians had enjoyed years of rule over Greek territories. Under Cyrus the Great, Persia became an imperial power. Under Darius the Great (the same King Darius who appears in Aeschylus’s play as a ghost), Persia extended its reach all the way from modern-day India to modern-day Europe. During this era, Greek city-states were expected to pay tribute and obey laws set by Persian leaders, a policy that frequently caused great unrest in Greece. Though Darius was able to keep these Greek rebellions mostly at bay, by Xerxes’s time, the balance of power had shifted, with the Greeks reclaiming political and cultural control of their homelands.
Other Books Related to The Persians
Four years before Aeschylus wrote The Persians, a Greek playwright named Phyrnicus penned The Phoenician Women, another play about the Battle of Salamis. Unfortunately, Phyrnicus’s treatment of this conflict did not survive beyond antiquity. More important than the plays that came before Aeschylus, however, are the plays that came after him. Aeschylus’s work directly influenced that of the other two great Greek dramatists, Sophocles (famous for plays like Oedipus Rex and Antigone) and Euripides (known for Medea and the Bacchae). Indeed, Aeschylus is often credited as the “Father of Tragedy” because his plays are widely seen as the foundations of classical drama—and thus of Western theater as a whole.
Key Facts about The Persians
- Full Title: The Persians
- Where Written: Athens, Greece
- When Published: 472 BCE
- Literary Period: Classical
- Genre: Greek Tragedy, Verse Drama
- Setting: On the grounds of King Xerxes’s royal palace, in the Persian city of Sousa
- Climax: The Queen of Persia successfully summons the ghost of her dead husband Darius to discuss the carnage at Salamis.
- Antagonist: The Greek army
- Point of View: The play is narrated by a Greek Chorus of Persian “elders” (advisors to the royal family)
Extra Credit for The Persians
Recent History, Ancient Play. The Persians is the oldest surviving play from the classical era of Greek drama, predating other Greek dramatists (like Sophocles and Euripides) by nearly 30 years. But The Persians is also the only Greek tragedy to be about relatively recent history, depicting a conflict—the Persian battle against the Greeks at the island of Salamis—that had occurred just seven years ago. In fact, almost no plays in the entire history of Western drama have focused on such contemporary history, making The Persians a rarity not only among Greek plays but in the theatrical canon as a whole.
Staging Sousa. While some of Aeschylus’s plays—including his oft-adapted Oresteia trilogy—are frequently revived all of over the world, The Persians is rarely produced today. There’s a reason for that: as acclaimed theater director Anne Bogart puts it, “it’s nearly impossible to do,” largely because there is so little plot and so much focus on the Chorus. At the same time, however, Bogart and other interpreters have insisted that The Persians is uniquely important to perform, both for its political message and because it marks “the moment when tragedy was invented in the Western world.”
