The Persians

Aeschylus’s tragic play The Persians, dating from 472 BCE, depicts the bloody events of the Persians’ battle against the Athenian Greeks at the island of Salamis—a conflict that had concluded only eight years earlier. But while Aeschylus, as a Greek, hailed from the victorious side of the conflict, he chose to set his play in the Persian court, focusing on the shame the Queen of Persia and her son Xerxes feel at having…

In Aeschylus’s Ancient Greek tragedy The Persians, the young Persian king Xerxes, eager to emulate his famed father Darius, arrogantly launches an invasion of the Greek city of Athens. Unfortunately for Xerxes, however, the Greeks decimate the Persian forces at the naval Battle of Salamis, devastating Persia’s civilians and humiliating its royal family. In fact, the loss is so embarrassing that it rouses the ghost of Darius from his grave, prompting…

Aeschylus’s play The Persians, from the 5th century BCE, uses the Ancient Greek device of the Chorus to tell the story of the Battle of Salamis, where the powerful Persians were decimated by the more strategically-savvy Greek forces. For much of the play, the Chorus exists mostly to chant and sing of Persia’s “woe,” using the classical form of Strophes and Antistrophes to imagine wives who have lost their husbands and children who…

The Persians, a play by the Ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus, focuses on the titular Persian citizens after their humiliating loss to the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis. But as various characters (including the Persian king Xerxes and a trusted Messenger) relate stories of the carnage, their speeches reflect not only the depth of their losses but the rigidity of their gendered beliefs. The men of the Persian army are often described…