Aeschylus

Aeschylus is the earliest Greek tragedian whose work survives and is generally called the father of tragedy. Born at Eleusis around 525 BC into a landowning family, he fought at Marathon in 490 BC, where his brother was killed, and probably at Salamis in 480 BC. His own epitaph, which he is said to have composed, mentions his conduct at Marathon and says nothing about his plays — which indicates how an Athenian of his generation ranked the two. Seven of perhaps eighty plays survive. He introduced the second actor, which is what made dramatic conflict possible; before it, a single performer exchanged lines only with the chorus. He reduced the chorus's dominance, used spectacle, costume and stage machinery, and wrote in a dense, heavily metaphorical style. He worked in connected trilogies, and the Oresteia of 458 BC is the only complete one to survive: Agamemnon, in which the returning king is murdered by his wife; the Libation Bearers, in which their son Orestes kills her; and the Eumenides, in which he is pursued by the Furies and tried at Athens, where Athena establishes a jury court and casts the deciding vote. The sequence traces the replacement of blood vengeance by law, and was staged as the Athenian courts were being reformed. The Persians of 472 BC is the only surviving Greek tragedy on a contemporary subject, and treats the defeated enemy with something close to sympathy. He died at Gela in Sicily in 456 BC. The tradition that an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head is a late story.

• Lived: 525 BCE – 456 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: writer, painter