Inventor of Tragedy Dies a Tragicomic Death
Aeschylus (525 – 455 BC) was a farmworker in Ancient Athens, when he had a vision in which the god Dionysius ordered him to write plays. So Aeschylus downed his farming implements, gave his notice, and started writing plays. It was a good career move. He ended up becoming Ancient Greece’s greatest playwright, and penned more than 90 plays, most of them winning prizes in Athens’ great drama festivals, and many of them are still performed in theaters around the world to this day. Aeschylus is credited with founding serious drama, and is frequently referred to as the “The Father of Tragedy”.
He practically invented acting, as we understand the term today. Before Aeschylus, theater consisted of a narrator telling a story, interrupted at intervals with a chorus performing a song and dance. He was not satisfied with following in the same rut and simply letting a narrator recount his plays, so Aeschylus used actors instead to play out the story with distinct roles and an exchange of dialogue. He raised production values by using striking imagery and extravagant costumes, and his innovations also included a wheeled platform to change stage scenery. He also used a crane to lift actors in scenes involving flight or descent from the heavens.
Aeschylus’ main themes were conflicts between men and the gods, between the individual and the state, and the inevitability of divine retribution for sins. Back then, playwrights submitted three tragedies for competitions at drama festivals, and Aeschylus became the first to link his three plays into a unified trilogy. His trilogies usually followed a family over several generations, such as the Oresteia, about king Agamemnon during the Trojan War, and his descendants in its aftermath.
He was also a citizen-soldier, and he fought in the Battle of Marathon, in which his brother was killed. He also fought in the naval battles of Artemisium and Salamis, and his wartime experiences found expression in his play, The Persians. For all his literary accomplishments, Aeschylus’ self-penned epitaph did not mention his success as a playwright. Instead, it stated what he was proudest of in his life and what he most wanted to be remembered for: that he had fought at the Battle of Marathon.
Aeschylus’ dramatic life came to a dramatic – or more like tragicomic – end in 455 BC, while he was visiting Gela, in Sicily. He received a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object, so he left the city and stayed outdoors to avoid that fate. A common theme in Greek drama is the futility of trying to avoid one’s fate, and the dramatist’s attempt to avoid his prophesized fate proved futile as he sat in a field outside Gela. An eagle, clutching a tortoise in its talons and seeking something with which to break the shell, mistook Aeschylus’ bald head for a rock. It dropped the tortoise on his shiny dome, and killed him instantly.
