What we know of Aeschylus's life--and, as said before, much of what we know about these tragedians' lives has not

come to us in any intact, well-preserved biography, but through careful detective work by scholars like Wilamowitz--intertwined beautifully with the history of the Greek drama of which he was so crucial a part. Aeschylus was from the town of Eleusis, home of the famous Mysteries that were the center of Greek occult and esoteric religion. There were fertility rites which initiated celebrants into worship of Demeter, the earth goddess, whose loss and retrieval of her daughter Persephone was a metaphor for the cycles of natural decline and renewal. Thus, in his background, Aeschylus possessed the proximity TO ritual and worship that characterized early Greek drama. Aeschylus is often pictured as a sober stalwart, a bastion of civic responsibility; and he certainly was this, in his maturity he was a publicly minded Athenian active

in his city's wars against the invading Persian Empire. But caricatures of his personality (some admittedly done by nearcontemporaries such as Aristophanes) sometimes make him seem the Greek equivalent of the Roman Cato the Censor: an abstemious custodian of the old days. Aeschylus was more of a 'Dionysian' guy than we think, and not only because he many times won the annual Dionysian competition in Athens, This was the major competition for new plays; ancient Greek dramatic culture was rather like todays novelistic culture, with the overwhelming importance of the Booker Prize, national Book Award, et cetera; and, in turn, there was a common prize-orientedness' between the drama and athletic competition s like the Olympic games; this connection between sporting and poetical achievement had already been made by the lyric poet Pindar, father of the ode. Aeschylus came to drama only in midcareer after establishing his public reputation. We may conclude that his life

experience helped enrich his aesthetic approach so that, in his work, European drama received its initiation in the hands of someone well practiced in ritual, war, and civic affairs.

Aeschylus most likely was an actor in his own early plays, and it is interesting to think of him as an 'actor' in two senses, in other words, that his military and political career also involved acting, playing a role before the public, even if there was no feigning or adoption of another character involved. This is also interesting in that, by the end of the ancient world, acting had become virtually coextensive with effeminacy (I guess on the hypothesis that being an actor liberated the effeminate man to 'act like a woman'), and yet Aeschylus--who more or less invented the actor as we know it, the actor who engages with another actor on-stage, by introducing the second actor and having drama replace and augment and

interspersed series of choral odes--was an unquestionably macho figure. Incidentally, the idea of an actor is supposed to have been invented by Thespis, a previous tragedian--hence the adjective 'thespian' for actor). Aeschylus's immersion in ritual and ceremony show up directly in his plays. Aside from THE PERSIANS, the one remaining drama we have by him on contemporary issues, his civic and military career does not. However one of the paradoxes we have to take into account hewn discussing Athenian drama is that, just because it did not represent contemporary political events on stage, this does not mean it was not informed by those events. Not only do representations of war, politics, and social conflict in the plays inevitably feed off what the contemporary audience would have been thinking about in those respects at the time, but, as scholars such as G W F Hegel and Werner Jaeger have noted, the

confidence and the sense of civil education these plays conveyed could not have arisen from a society that was not as newly wealthy, powerful, and, after its role in fending off Persia, proud of itself as Athens was. We see Aeschylus as " Mr. Oresteia" and not read the other plays so much. We also tend to forget that, as with Sophocles, we possess a very small fragment of the entire oeuvre. Aeschylus tended to write in trilogies, and some of his remaining plays, like THE SUPPLIANTS (the first of the 'Danaid trilogy', or SEVEN Against Thebes, the last of the Oedipus trilogy'. We see Sophocles writing Electra, which is extent, and think he is 'poaching on Aeschyluss turf. Yet Aeschylus also wrote an Oedipus trilogy, like Sophocles, of which only the last play, seven against Thebes. survives. (Aeschylus, though. importantly, did not write an Antigone). Though ideas of justice and civic duty are important in the Oresteia. We should not extrapolate from

this and mount them as Aeschyluss unyielding credo. We do not; as it were know his work well enough for that, and barring dramatic archaeological discoveries we
never will