Aeschylus was a Greek playwright who initiated theater reforms and influenced the genre of drama. He wrote around 90 plays, but only a few survive today. Aeschylus was also a soldier and shifted the focus of Greek tragedies to human tragedy. He died in exile but was rediscovered and his legacy can be seen in modern theater.
Aeschylus was a Greek playwright, the first of the three great tragedians of ancient Greece. His work continues to be widely read, performed and discussed today in nations around the world, despite being thousands of years old. Many people credit Aeschylus with initiating a series of Greek theater reforms, setting the stage for Euripides and Sophocles, the other Ancient Greek tragedians who dominated the genre of drama for centuries.
Aeschylus was born in 525 BC, in a rural part of Attic Greece, the region of Greece that was governed by the Athenian city-state. According to Greek legend, he originally worked in a vineyard, later tending the family’s animals, and the gods visited him with a vision of him at the age of 26, telling him that he should take up the quill instead of the shepherd’s crook. . His first play won accolades and he turned to playwriting as a career.
It is estimated that Aeschylus may have written as many as 90 plays, but unfortunately fewer than 10 survive today, including Seven Against Thebes, The Persians, The Supplicants, Eumenides, Coefori, and L’Orestia, which is actually a trilogy of related plays. Another play, Prometheus Bound, has been attributed to Aeschylus by his contemporaries, but modern historians suspect that it may not actually be his work.
Besides being a playwright, Aeschylus was also a soldier, fighting in the Greek war against the Persians, and this experience heavily influenced the content of his plays. One of his most notable achievements as a playwright was to shift the focus of Greek tragedies from the chorus to the actors and focus on human tragedy as much as the great myths and legends of the Greek gods. His contribution to ancient Greek culture was recognized during his lifetime with numerous awards and honors.
Sadly, towards the end of his life, Aeschylus began to fall out of favor and eventually moved to Sicily, where he died in exile in 456. Within 50 years, however, the Greeks rediscovered his work and performed it, marking a dramatic departure from the previous trend of refusing to perform plays after the playwright’s death. Aeschylus also introduced complex props and costumes to the stage to make his plays more realistic, a legacy that can be seen in modern theater performances around the world today.
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