FOUNDATIONS Ancient to 1700s

Aeschylus – Birth of Tragedy

He stands at the pivot where ritual becomes literature, where the thunder of drums and the circling of dancers turn into characters with names, guilt, motives, and choices. Before him the chorus shouted and stamped and called the god into the city; with him the god is still there—dark, implacable, tremendous—but now human beings step forward and speak in their own voices, and the city leans in to hear them. Aeschylus is less a single author than a change of state. The Greeks already had festivals, hymns, dithyrambs, masks, sacred frenzy; what they did not have until him was this particular fusion of song and argument, of dance and decision, of omen and verdict. He brings onstage a second actor, and with that spare addition everything alters: the chorus is no longer the whole, but a sea against which two figures can throw their words; debate becomes possible; the distance between one face and another fills with fate. He writes not to entertain a crowd but to instruct a city about itself. Yet the instruction is not a sermon; it is blood, breath, and the hard grammar of consequence. To watch Aeschylus for the first time is to feel the air of old worship crackle and then steady into the oxygen of civic thought.

His birth near Eleusis around 525 BCE places him in a neighborhood where mystery was already a word with heat in it. Eleusis, home of the rites that promised a kind of blessedness to initiates in honor of Demeter and Persephone, was a suburb of awe; boyhood there meant growing up under the rumor that the world has layers, that bread and grief and harvest and return are more than agriculture. Whether or not he knew the rites as a youth, the sensibility of Eleusis—the sense that suffering can be meaningful, that descent and return is a rhythm written into the soil—pervades his plays. He is also a soldier before he is publicly a poet. He fights at Marathon in 490, stands in the surf of Salamis in 480, likely tastes the iron taste of fear at Plataea; his epitaph will remember him not for his poetry but for his courage on the day when the barbarians came. He belongs to that generation of Athenians who learned at spear point that a city is not an accident but a discipline, and that discipline must eventually be written down in laws. The tragedies are part of that writing.