Aeschylus

Aeschylus - in UK HE, the name is usually pronounced with the first vowel, which has the stress, like that in 'see' and the '-ch-' as '-k-': 'EES-kill-es' IPA: /'iːskələs/ - an Athenian citizen and the 'father of Greek tragedy', was born in about 525 BCE and died probably in 456. His lifetime coincided therefore with one of the most momentous periods in Athenian and in Greek history. As a teenager he lived through the end of 'tyrannical' or 'monarchical' rule in Athens - the last of the 'tyrants', Hippias, was overthrown in 510 - and during the rest of his life he will have witnessed the many changes which took place in the democratic form of government which was established after the overthrow of Hippias. In the early decades of the fifth century Greece was under threat from the Persians, who, led by their king Xerxes, twice attacked the Greek mainland. Aeschylus fought in the battle of Marathon in 490, when the Greeks defeated the Persians on land, and probably also took part in the sea battle of Salamis in 480, when the Greeks secured a decisive victory over the Persians..

Aeschylus wrote a very large number of tragedies - certainly more than 80 - but only seven have survived. They are Supplices (The Suppliant Women), Seven against Thebes (467), Persians (472), Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, Choephoroi (Libation Bearers), and Eumenides. The last three, produced together towards the end of Aeschylus' life in 458, are the greatest and best known of his tragedies. They form a trilogy (known as the Oresteia or Oresteian Trilogy) which deals with Agamemnon's murder by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegistheus, the killing of Clytemnestra and Aegistheus by Agamemnon's son, Orestes, in revenge for his father's death, and Orestes' appearance before the court of the Areopagus in Athens on a charge of murder and his acquittal on the casting vote of the goddess Athene.

The theme of many of Aeschylus' tragedies, as of the Oresteia, is the inescapability of divine justice, its ability to accommodate within itself mutually antagonistic points of view. and hence its capacity to resolve even the most deep-seated conflicts.