The Persians
The Persians | |
---|---|
Persian Elders | |
Characters | Atossa Messenger Ghost of Darius Xerxes |
Date premiered | 472 BC |
Place premiered | Athens |
Original language | Ancient Greek |
Setting | Susa |
The Persians (
.Place in Aeschylus' work
The first play in the trilogy, called Phineus, presumably dealt with
In The Persians,
The
Summary
The Persians takes place in
On, sons of Greece! Set free
Your fatherland, set free your children, wives,
Places of your ancestral gods and tombs of your ancestors!
Forward for all[7]
In the original, this reads:
ὦ παῖδες Ἑλλήνων ἴτε,
ἐλευθεροῦτε πατρίδ', ἐλευθεροῦτε δὲ
παῖδας, γυναῖκας, θεῶν τέ πατρῴων ἕδη,
θήκας τε προγόνων: νῦν ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀγών.
At the tomb of her dead husband
Discussion
Aeschylus was not the first to write a play about the Persians — his older contemporary
Interpretations of Persians either read the play as sympathetic toward the defeated Persians or else as a celebration of Greek victory within the context of an ongoing war.
Subsequent production history
According to a
Seventy years after the play was produced, the comic playwright Aristophanes mentions an apparent Athenian reproduction of The Persians in his Frogs (405 BC).[14] In it, he has Aeschylus describe The Persians as "an effective sermon on the will to win. Best thing I ever wrote"; while Dionysus says that he "loved that bit where they sang about the days of the great Darius, and the chorus went like this with their hands and cried 'Wah! Wah!'" (1026–28).[15]
The Persians was popular in the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire, who also fought wars with the Persians, and its popularity has endured in modern Greece. According to Anthony Podlecki, during a production at Athens in 1965 the audience "rose to its feet en masse and interrupted the actors' dialogue with cheers."[16]
The American Peter Sellars directed an important production of The Persians at the Edinburgh Festival and Los Angeles Festival in 1993, which articulated the play as a response to the Gulf War of 1990–1991. The production was in a new translation by Robert Auletta.[17] It opened at the Royal Lyceum Theatre on 16 August 1993.[18] Hamza El Din composed and performed its music, with additional music by Ben Halley Jr. and sound design by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger.[18] Dunya Ramicova designed the costumes and James F. Ingalls the lighting.[18] Cordelia Gonzalez played Atossa, Howie Seago the Ghost of Darius, and John Ortiz played Xerxes.[18] The Chorus was performed by Ben Halley Jr, Joseph Haj, and Martinus Miroto.[18]
Ellen McLaughlin translated Persians in 2003 for Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre in New York as a response to George Bush's invasion of Iraq.[19] The production starred Len Cariou as Darius and Michael Stuhlbarg as Xerxes.
A 2010 translation by Aaron Poochigian[20] included for the first time the detailed notes for choral odes that Aeschylus himself created, which directed lines to be spoken by specific parts of the chorus (strophe and antistrophe). Using Poochigian's edition, which includes theatrical notes and stage directions, "Persians" was presented in a staged read-through as part of New York's WorkShop Theater Company's Spring 2011 one-act festival "They That Have Borne the Battle."[21]
Also in 2010, Kaite O'Reilly's award-winning translation was produced on Sennybridge Training Area (a military range in the Brecon Beacons) by National Theatre Wales. Audiences valued the way this production required them to shift their attention between the spectacular landscape surrounding them, the particular history of the area, and the modern adaptation of the ancient Greek text performed onstage.[22] The work went on to win O'Reilly the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, presented by the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.
Οn the occasion of the 2500th anniversary of the
The play is currently in production as one of a double bill in the 2022 Cambridge Greek Play.
In March 2024 Dublin's Abbey Theatre staged the first Irish language translation of the play by poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.[24]
Influence
Aeschylus' drama was a model for Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1821 Hellas: A Lyrical Drama, his final published poetical work before his death in 1822. T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, "The Burial of the Dead", line 63 "I had not thought Death had undone so many" echoes line 432 of the Messenger account in The Persians: "However, you can be sure that so great a multitude of men never perished in a single day",[25] which is also similar to Dante's line in Inferno, Canto III, lines 56–57: ch'i' non averei creduto/Che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.[26]
In modern literature, Dimitris Lyacos in his dystopian epic[27] Z213: Exit uses quotations from the Messenger's account[28] in The Persians (δίψῃ πονοῦντες, οἱ δ᾽ ὑπ᾽ ἄσθματος κενοὶ: some, faint from thirst, while some of us, exhausted and panting[29]) in order to convey the failure of a military operation and the subsequent retreat of the troops in a post-apocalyptic setting.[30] The excerpts from The Persians enter a context of fragmentation whereby broken syntax is evocative of a landscape in the aftermath of war.[31]
Translations into English
- Robert Potter, 1777 – verse: full text
- Anna Swanwick, 1886 – verse: full text
- E. D. A. Morshead, 1908 – verse
- Walter George Headlam and C. E. S. Headlam, 1909 – prose
- Herbert Weir Smyth, 1922 – prose: full text
- G. M. Cookson, 1922 – verse
- Gilbert Murray, 1939 – verse
- Seth G. Benardete, 1956 – verse
- Philip Vellacott, 1961 – verse
- Ted Hughes, 1971 – incorporated into Orghast
- Janet Lembke and C.J. Herington, 1981
- Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish, 1991
- Edith Hall, 1996
- Ellen McLaughlin, 2004 – verse
- George Theodoridis, 2009 – prose: full text
- Aaron Poochigian, 2010, verse[32]
- Ian C. Johnston, 2012, verse: full text
- James Romm, 2016 – verse
Notes
- ^ A catalogue of Aeschylus' plays contains the two titles Glaucus Potnieus and Glaucus Pontius – hence the uncertainty. To add to the confusion, one title could easily be a garbled duplicate of the other. The consensus seems to favor Glaucus Potnieus
- ^ Garvie 2009, xl–xlvi); however see Muller/Lewis 1858, p. 322.
- ^ According to the hypothesis of The Persians found, for instance, in the Loeb and OCT editions of Aeschylus' plays.
- ^ a b "Aeschylus Fragments 57–154". theoi.com. Retrieved 2011-07-24.
- ^ ISBN 0-674-99161-3.
- ^ Taxidou (2004, 99).
- ^ page 401–405. Raphael and Macleish (1991, p. 14).
- ^ Raphael and McLeish (1991, 20).
- ^ Raphael and McLeish (1991, p. 26).
- ^ See Herodotus 6.21.2 and Taxidou (2004, pp. 96–97).
- ^ For the first reading, see, for example, Segal (1993, p. 165) and Pelling (1997, pp. 1–19); for the second, see Hall (1996) and Harrison (2000). While there is some disagreement, the consensus is that the Persian Wars did not come to a formal conclusion until 449 BC with the Peace of Callias.
- ^ See Hall (1991).
- ^ The Vita Aeschyli §18 repeats this claim, adding that the play was well received there. For questions surrounding this Sicilian production and its bearing on the text of the Persae that survives, see Broadhead 2009, pp. xlviii–liii; Garvie 2009, pp. liii–lvii.
- ^ Garvie 2009, p. lv.
- ^ See Barrett 1964, p. 194.
- ^ Podlecki (1986, p. 78).
- ^ See Favorini (2003) and Banham (1998, p. 974).
- ^ a b c d e From the programme to the Edinburgh Festival production.
- ^ McLaughlin (2005, p. 254)
- ^ http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu:80/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=9781421400631&qty=1&source=2&viewMode=3&loggedIN=false&JavaScript=y released by Johns Hopkins University Press
- ^ They That Have Borne the Battle Veterans Festival http://workshoptheater.org/jewelbox/2011/TheyThatHave Archived 2011-09-02 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 9781783205714.
- ^ Live from Epidaurus: Aeschylus’ “The Persians” in international live streaming from the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus http://greekfestival.gr/live-from-epidaurus-aeschylus-quot-the-persians-quot-in-international-live-streaming-from-the-ancient-theatre-of-epidaurus/?lang=en, Date accessed: 2020-07-25
- ^ https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whats-on/na-peirsigh-persians/
- ^ Aeschylus, Persians, line 432. Herbert Weir Smyth Ed. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0012%3Acard%3D480
- ^ Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, Inferno, Canto III, lines 56–57.http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com
- ^ Michael O'Sullivan. The precarious destitute. A possible commentary on the lives of unwanted immigrants. http://www.asiancha.com/content/view/2105/505/
- ^ Dimitris Lyacos Z213: Exit. Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press 2010, pp. 77–81.
- ^ Aeschylus, Persians, line 484. Herbert Weir Smyth, ed. Retrieved 7 December 2018.
- ^ Allison Elliott, A review of Z213: Exit by Dimitris Lyacos. Retrieved 7 December 2018. Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Spencer Dew, A review of "Poena Damni, Z213: Exit. Retrieved 7 December 2018.
- ISBN 9781421400648.
References
- Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-43437-8.
- Barrett, David, trans. 1964. The Frogs. By Aristophanes. In The Wasps / The Poet and the Women / The Frogs. London: Penguin, 1986. 147–212. ISBN 0-14-044152-2.
- Broadhead, H. D. 2009. The Persae of Aeschylus. Cambridge.
- Favorini, Attilio. 2003. "History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus' Persians." Theatre Journal 55:1 (March): 99–111.
- Garvie, A. F. 2009 Aeschylus Persae. Oxford.
- ISBN 0-19-814780-5.
- Hall, Edith. 1996. Aeschylus Persians: Text and Commentary. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. ISBN 0-85668-597-6.
- Harrison, Thomas. 2000. The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus' Persians and the History of the Fifth Century. London: Gerald Duckworth. ISBN 0-7156-2968-9.
- Lesky, Albin et al. 1996. A History of Greek Literature. Hackett. ISBN 0-87220-350-6.
- McLaughlin, Ellen. 2005. The Greek Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group. ISBN 978-1-55936-240-5.
- Muller, K. O. 1858. History of the Literature of Ancient Greece: To the Period of Isocrates. Trans. George C. Lewis. Longmans, Green & Co.
- Munn, Mark H. 2000. The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates. Berkeley: U of California P. ISBN 0-520-23685-8.
- Podlecki, A. J. 1986. "Polis and Monarchy in Early Greek Tragedy." In Greek Tragedy and Political Theory. Ed. Peter Euben. New ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. ISBN 0-520-05584-5.
- ISBN 0-413-65190-8.
- Segal, Charles. Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus and Hecuba. Durham: Duke UP. ISBN 0-8223-1360-X.
- Taxidou, Olga. 2004. Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. ISBN 0-7486-1987-9.
External links
- The Persians at Project Gutenberg
- Works related to The Persians at Wikisource
- Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article: Πέρσαι
- See original Greek version
- See the Smyth (1926) translation
- The Persians public domain audiobook at LibriVox