 | The Persians |  |
ARGUMENT.
When Xerxes came to the throne of Persia, remembering how his father Dareios had sought to subdue the land of the Hellenes, and seeking to avenge the defeat of Datis and Artaphernes on the field of Marathon, he gathered together a mighty host of all nations under his dominion, and led them against Hellas. And at first he prospered and prevailed, crossed the Hellespont, and defeated the Spartans at Thermopylæ, and took the city of Athens, from which the greater part of its citizens had fled. But at last he and his armament met with utter overthrow at Salamis. Meanwhile Atossa, the mother of Xerxes, with her handmaids and the elders of the Persians, waited anxiously at Susa, where was the palace of the great king, for tidings of her son.
Note.—Within two years after the battle of Salamis, the feeling of national exultation was met by Phrynichos in a tragedy bearing the title of the Phœnikians, and having for its subject the defeat of Xerxes. As he had come under the displeasure of the Athenian demos for having brought on the stage the sufferings of their Ionian kinsmen in his Capture of Miletos, he was apparently anxious to regain his popularity by a ‘sensation’ drama of another kind; and his success seems to have prompted Æschylos to a like attempt five years later, B. C. 473. The Tetralogy to which the play belonged, and which gained the first prize on its representation, included the two tragedies (unconnected in subject) of Phineus and Glaucos, and the satyric drama of Prometheus the Firestealer.
The play has, therefore, the interest of being strictly a contemporary narrative of the battle of Salamis and its immediate consequences, by one who may himself have been present at it, and whose brother Ameinias (Herod. viii. 93) had distinguished himself in it by a special act of heroism. As such, making all allowance for the influence of dramatic exigencies, and the tendency to colour history so as to meet the tastes of patriotic Athenians, it may claim, where it differs from the story told by Herodotos, to be a more trustworthy record. And it has, we must remember, the interest of being the only extant drama of its class, the only tragedy the subject of which is not taken from the cycle of heroic myths, but from the national history of the time. Far below the Oresteian Trilogy, as it may seem to us, as a work of art, having more the character of a spectacle than a poem, it was, we may well believe, unusually successful at the time, and it is said to have been chosen by Hiero for reproduction at Syracuse after Æschylos had settled there under his patronage.
| The Persians | |