Marathon's veteran taught Athens how tragedy works
Aeschylus, born about 525 BC in Eleusis, is often called tragedy's father because Western scripts begin in bulk with him. He wrote some seventy to ninety plays; only seven survive whole. He fought Persians at Marathon and likely Salamis before dying around 456 BC.
Pausanias repeats a tale that Dionysus, visiting in a dream, ordered the young vineyard worker to write tragedy; his first production came in 499 BC and his first Dionysia victory in 484. Politics framed his teens: Cleomenes drove the Peisistratids out in 510 BC and Cleisthenes reorganised Athens by deme. In 490 BC he and his brother Cynegeirus met Darius's invasion at Marathon, where Cynegeirus died grabbing at a fleeing Persian ship; he fought again at Salamis in 480 and Plataea in 479.
Aristotle credits him with adding actors so that characters could clash with one another instead of only answering the chorus. He probably pioneered the connected trilogy, and the Oresteia is the sole surviving example. The Persians, staged in 472 BC with Pericles paying for the chorus, is the only extant Greek tragedy about a recent event, blaming Xerxes's defeat on royal pride. Prometheus Bound may be the work of his son Euphorion instead.
An initiate of Demeter's mysteries at Eleusis, he was reportedly charged with impiety for revealing cult secrets on stage; one account has a mob trying to stone him, and tradition says jurors acquitted him partly for his family's war service. He won first prize thirteen times by one ancient count, against eighteen for Sophocles and five for Euripides, and after his death Athens allowed his tragedies alone to be restaged in competition.
He died at Gela in Sicily around 456 BC. The famous story that an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head may be legend, and his epitaph recalls only his soldiering.
Source: Aeschylus
