perform, though there is no doubt that both the tragedies and the comedies were great state occasions and popular
national events. Phrynichus in his Phoenissae and Fall of Miletus, his slightly younger rival Aeschylus in the
Persae, and also much later writers dared to treat contemporary political themes directly in the theatre. Many other
tragedies touched on the real world in a few verses or less directly. The Oedipus at Colonus, the last masterpiece of
Sophocles, cannot be fully understood without the force of its real context, its first production as the city of Athens
toppled to its fall.
Aeschylus
We have seven complete plays by Aeschylus, unless we accept the opinion recently accepted by many scholars
that Prometheus is not his. But it is worth while noting at once that wonderful as the texts are that came down to
us, they are a pitiful remnant of what once existed; their isolation from a huge context of similar works has surely
distorted our judgement of them in many ways. The fragments we have of the lost plays of Aeschylus extend his
range as poet and dramatist, and some of them are surprising. Who for example would have predicted his
humorous touch and gentle handling in satyr plays? But he was champion of that genre. And who would have
supposed that Aeschylus would present Achilles and Patroclus as full homosexual lovers? The fragments of
religious sublimity are less unexpected, yet every new fragment of Aeschylus on papyrus as it turns up is always a
surprise.
Only from Aeschylus have we a complete trilogy: that is, on at least one occasion his three tragedies were a
coherent series, a continuous story. This is the Oresteia, of which the first play, the Agamemnon, has the most
powerful impact of any ancient tragedy, grander and more thrilling even than the Oedipus of Sophocles, which
Aristotle took to be the classic tragedy. The resolution of the Oresteia in the Eumenides, its third play, remains
strangely moving to this day, and perhaps as close as we can come to intellectual understanding of the problems
and solutions of the late archaic Greek world. It is a world utterly remote from ours, but the further one enters into
it the more surely one realizes that we cannot afford to neglect it. Aeschylus is Blake-like, but without the
obscurities or the divided mind of Blake. He is Shakespearean, but with a terrible concentration. His theatre is a
circle of dead silence, and he used the form of his plays to the marrow of their bones.
Agamemnon begins quietly, with the Watcher on the roof. The chorus of old men is to come; this is the moment
before daybreak, the opening of the theatre festival in 458, when Aeschylus was about sixty-seven. He had two
more years to live.
I ask the gods for relief of these labours,
this watch from year's end to year's end, crouched
on the roof of the Atreidae like a dog.
I know the assembly of night stars
the bright lords glittering in upper air
that bring winter and summer to mankind.
I attend for the signal light to burn
and for the flame to blaze the news of Troy,
the city fallen. We are mastered here
by a woman's man-minded all-hoping heart.
While my night-restless bed wettens with dew
and no dreams ever watch over my sleep,
because I must not shut my eyes and sleep,
pounding out song for a drug against sleep,