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Performance, Grief, and Community
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Persians, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
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 as “bold warriors,” with many of the play’s long monologues devoted solely to listing the names of prominent generals. By contrast, the play’s Greek Chorus repeatedly insists that the Persian women “in softness weep,” their “delicate hands rending their veils, drenching their breasts, swollen with tears,” a description that suggests fragility and passivity. And most importantly, the men grieve out in the open, chanting loud “lamentations” of their “shame” and their “woe,” while the women (with the exception of the Queen of Persia herself) are cloistered in their homes, burying their tears in “couches” and under “coverlets.” Ultimately, then, The Persians suggests that even in moments of great national devastation, gender norms determine how individuals get to process this loss: men are expected to grieve communally and publicly while women must suffer privately at home, unseen by one another—and thus conspicuously absent from the play itself.
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Gendered Roles and Loss ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Gendered Roles and Loss appears in each chapter of The Persians. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Chapter
The Persians
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Gendered Roles and Loss Quotes in The Persians
Below you will find the important quotes in The Persians related to the theme of Gendered Roles and Loss.
The Persians Quotes
CHORUS: For the king’s return
with his many-manned troops
doom is the feeling
in my heart convulsed,
as it faces the future.
For all Asia is gone,
its strength and its youth:
and the women lament for their men.
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CHORUS, STROPHE E: All the horse and infantry
like a swarm of bees have gone
with the captain of the host,
who joined the headlands of either land,
crossing the yoke of the sea.
CHORUS, ANTISTROPHE E: Beds with longing fill with tears,
Persian wives in softness weep;
each her armed furious lord
dismissed with gentle love and grief,
left all alone in the yoke.
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QUEEN: Thus in the night these visions
I dreamed: but when, arisen, I touched the springs’
fair-flowing waters, approached the altar, wishing
to offer sacrifice religiously
to guardian deities, whose rites these are,
then to Phoebus’ hearth I saw an eagle fleeing.
Dumb in dread I stood: a falcon swooped
upon him, its wings in flight, its claws plucked
At his head: he did no more than cower, hare-like.
Those were my terrors to see, and yours to hear.
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MESSENGER: At once
concordant strokes of oars in roaring eddies
slapped the waters’ depths: soon we saw
them all: first the right wing led in order,
next advanced the whole armada.
A great concerted cry we heard: “O Greek
sons, advance! Free your fathers’ land,
free your sons, your wives, the sanctuaries
of paternal gods, the sepulchers
of ancestors. Now the contest’s drawn:
all is at stake!”
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CHORUS (chanting): O! Zeus, king, you destroyed
the multitudinous, proud
host of the Persian men;
and the cities of Sousa
and of Agbatana
concealed in the darkness of grief.
[…] The ladies of Persia
softly are weeping,
desiring each
him to behold
wedded but lately;
forsaking their couches,
soft with their coverlets,
the joy of their youth,
now they lament their sorrows,
insatiate, full of woe.
And I recite the mourning song,
doom of the gone,
woe upon woe.
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QUEEN: Everything, Darius, you will hear
succinctly: all of Persia is destroyed.
DARIUS: How? A lightning bolt of hunger? Civil
strife within the city?
QUEEN: No, but all
the host’s destroyed at Athens.
DARIUS: Whom among
my sons was the leader of the troops? Tell me.
QUEEN: Furious Xerxes, who drained the country manless.
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XERXES (singing): Go wailing to your homes.
CHORUS (singing): O woe, ah!
XERXES: Cries of woe throughout the city.
CHORUS: Yes, cries of woe indeed.
XERXES: Softly stepping, moan in grief.
CHORUS: O Persian land in hardness stepped.
XERXES: Oh, oh, by triple banks of oars…
CHORUS: Oh, oh…our ships were destroyed by theirs.
We shall escort you
with mournful lament.
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