I Read a Play
Book Choice for October: The Persians, Aeschylus
Happy New Year! Yes, we are a few days into the New Year now, and I am just doing a bit of catch-up on my blog, tying up loose ends. I finished reading The Persians today, it took about an hour and a half to read all together, so it was rather short, although I do think it was complete. The ending made sense, but it didn’t really seem to tell an entire story. The play depicts how the Persian Queen, Atossa (the widow of the Persian king Darius) learns of her son Xerxes’ defeat at the hands of the Greeks at the sea-battle of Plataea. And then something cool happens, and then it ends. That’s it.
This play is something which probably requires a lot of context, and I didn’t read the Commentary yet, but I will. The gist of the historical situation of this play is that the Greeks were justifiably proud of their second repelling of a much larger force than their own (which probably was true), in 480 BC. The first attack on mainland Greece took place 10 years before, at Marathon, and also ended in disgrace for the Persians. After the second defeat Aeshchylus wrote this play, although Persians had likely been depicted in Greek dramas previously, but none of these other plays survive.
It’s very interesting, because obviously this play is meant to make Athenians feel justly proud of their achievements, and their democracy, and rip on the Persians’ autocracy and for not being able to beat them, despite being the great power of the world at the time. (The Persians make use of Egyptian soldiers and Babylonian troops, so this is after the time that Persia controlled both those territories as well). As a counterpoint: once in a Greek History class a professor told us laughingly something that seemed shocking at the time, as we were all there as devotees of “Classical civilization”: “Can you imagine how it was from the point of view of the Persians? They owned the world, all its goods and all its people. And they come to some place on the very edge of everything, with tiny towns and no written culture and in their minds, these people are so incredibly unimportant. What the Greeks remember as the glorious wars that formed their nation and identity, likely appeared to the Persians as meaningless scuffles with unwashed barbarians that it was unnecessary even to record.”
I’m paraphrasing, as it was more than 15 years ago, but suffice it to say, it was rather shocking to realize that in the lead-up to their own glorious “Classical” period, the Greeks really were, in the grand scheme of things, no big deal.
But, now. Now their records are what Western civilization very often has chosen to model itself on. When there were so many other enormous and older civilizations around, that few people today know much about. The Persians after all, were only inheriting territories conquered by the incredibly mighty and organized Assyrian empire. (Yes, those Bible guys).
The fact that the past as we know it, is almost totally an accident of preservation, is just boggling, especially in the case of those other Bible guys: the Biblical patriarchs who, although they set (some of) the trends that were followed by Western civilization for the next 2,000 plus years, in their heyday they were quite an isolated, fringe group of pastoralists, on the edge of much bigger happenings, outside of the much more advanced civilizations of their time. For some reason, Western history seems to have been put on its trajectory not by the losers, but by the nonentities (of their times).
It’s just interesting.
What is also interesting in this play comes during its final act: King Darius, Xerxes’ father, lately dead, is necromantically raised up to earth again for a chat. It’s very intriguing, and Aeschylus paints Darius as civilized and wise. Also, with all that is said in the play about Persia lamenting its dead, and the vivid refrains about wives mourning their husbands and families grieving their sons, this play is very sympathetic to those who lost loved ones, for a propaganda piece, if that is what it was meant to be. It’s possible that Aeschylus was diving deep into the emotions that make us all human, regardless of native culture…I need to study what has been written about this play more.
The Persians is just a very, very cool document to have, and I am sure that it has itself been influential, I would be that many of our perceptions about an East-West Europe/Asia divide were spawned by people thinking about this play. I definitely want to know more about this time period, and Archaic Greek literature in general after reading this. I am sure it’s just the tip of the iceberg of a whole history of thought.