The reader of Aeschylus, surveying the ever-increasing volume of material written over the past twenty or thirty years, might well note with a mixture of surprise and dismay that the results of so much labour have led not to any hoped-for unanimity of scholarly opinion or even the establishment of a general consensus of interpretative approach, but instead to an increasingly diverse range of possible viewpoints and methods of investigation. Indeed, faced with the inherently plausible but wholly divergent arguments and conclusions of different commentators, he might find himself very much in sympathy with Cicero’s own complaint: ‘while I am reading, I am in full agreement; once I have put down the book,.... all that agreement evaporates’. If anything, however, the expansion in methods of approach is but the symptom of a growing awareness that the very nature of the plays, with all their ambiguities, deliberately leaves room for and in fact invites a wide range of emotional and intellectual response. At the same time study of the text itself has seen a shift away from the adventurous - some would say arrogant - emendation of earlier decades, to a more conservative attitude towards the received tradition, and this in turn has not been without its effect upon recent editions. To complement the shift of emphasis as regards text has come the application of similar rigour to interpretation of stage events: the insistence that these be founded upon what the Greek actually says rather than what the commentator imagines should happen. Much of the pioneering work on this has been carried out by Oliver Taplin, whose generally sound sense now provides sure footing where previously there was almost unrelieved quicksand.

To glimpse the man behind the plays, to set him in his social, political, and theatrical context, to establish in other words a biography for Aeschylus, depends upon a variety of ancient sources in various states of preservation and of varying reliability: 1) the Life found in a number of the medieval manuscripts, 2) inscriptional evidence such as the Marmor Parium, 3) the Hypotheses attached to some of the plays, 4) the Fasti Theatri Atheniensis, 5) anecdotes and details preserved in the works of other ancient authors. Of these the first and last are undoubtedly the least reliable: too often similar or identical experiences are attached to a variety of subjects; details culled from a writer’s works become biographical facts, or scurrilous motivations are attached to otherwise credible actions. The following events, however, have proven generally acceptable:

According to the Life (cf. Scholia to Aristophanes Acharnions 10, Frogs 868) after his death Aeschylus was accorded the unique honour of having his plays restaged. This may account in part for the discrepancy in the number of victories won in the dramatic contests: 13 (Life), 28 (Suda), but further disagreement over the total number of plays produced: 70 tragedies, 5 satyr plays (Life), 73 dramas (Catalogue of Plays), 90 (Suda), suggests other factors at work - the loss of a whole column of titles is one suggestion.

On the level of purely subjective response there is no inherently incorrect or unjustifiable approach to the interpretation of character within the plays: the modern reader, like the ancient audience, is free to interpret according to individual experience or personal prejudice, and like all great writers Aeschylus has injected sufficient ambiguity into his creations to appeal to a wide spectrum of potential response. Of more objective concern on the other hand is the response Aeschylus aimed to produce, and the degree of importance he attached to the creation of character within the actual plays. In recent times the once popular exaltation of character, which viewed the figures on the stage as rounded and consistent wholes, has given way to a more Aristotelian assertion of economy in character portrayal, and its function of giving credibility to the more important element of plot. Thus Lucas states ‘most of the figures in Aeschylean tragedy are presented with the minimum of characterization; they are what the plot requires them to be and no more’. The earlier view, however, continues to be advanced, often in the more extreme guise of psychoanalysis, but while one cannot deny the useful insights the method sometimes produces, the exaggerated and wholly unrealistic claims advanced for it have proven totally counter-productive. At the opposite extreme is the insistence that portrayal of character lies totally at the mercy of transient dramatic necessity, making any quest for consistency doomed to failure from the start. It is a view that was first propounded for Sophocles by Tycho Wilamowitz and later applied to Aeschylus by Roger Dawe. Certainly in terms of logic Dawe’s proposition is hard to fault, and its very forthright expression serves as a welcome touchstone for others, but as P. E. Easterling observes, dramatic necessity is in many respects a sterile criterion of literary judgement. Somewhat similar in its final result if not in approach is the importance at times attributed to the divine factor in determining the actions of characters - the onset of Ate or an unspecified daimon that leads a man like Agamemnon to his doom. Again we cannot deny a role for the divine in the action of the plays, but to emphasize it to the exclusion of intelligibility in human terms risks negating belief that the characters portrayed are human beings at all rather than playthings of the gods.

I make no apologies for devoting the major part of this survey to a discussion of the individual plays, and in consequence limiting the amount of space given to general topics of Aeschylean technique. So disparate are the individual dramas that to do otherwise incurs the risk of either reducing any comment that is made to valueless platitudes by preferring the commonplace to the distinctive, or creating the impression that the playwright’s works constitute but a single enormous play. Concentration upon the individual plays also serves to reflect the continuing emphasis that recent scholarship places upon this aspect of the poet’s work, and to underscore the fact – all too easily forgotten – that Aeschylus was a writer of dramas, not a pedlar of theatrical effects.

Though the earliest extant tragedy, Persae is not an early play in terms of Aeschylus’ literary career; a simple, even ‘primitive’ play in its progression from prosperity to adversity and its emphatic clarity in depicting divine retribution following human pride, yet the successful conversion of historical fact into morally significant drama provides telling evidence of the playwright’s ability to control his material and exploit it for his own purposes that is not without importance for those plays founded on myth. Historical tragedy, however, presents its own peculiar difficulties: the need to balance retention of credibility by not straying too far from objective truth before an audience intimately involved in the events portrayed, with the equally potent need to emphasize, alter, distort, or repress those factors that run counter to the dramatic purpose of the play. In Persae we see this most graphically in the prominence given to Psytalleia as the counterpart to Salamis, the sparse attention to Darius’ own European campaigns, the implication of total Persian retreat immediately after Salamis, and the episode on the Strymon. No less important was the need to avoid converting the action into a celebration of Greek, or more specifically Athenian, victory - an inevitable factor (pace Kitto) in any depiction of Persian defeat, but by the same token one essentially inimical to the spirit of tragedy. That the playwright succeeded most commentators readily admit. Phrynichus had already shown the way in 476 B.c. by setting his own version of the war, Phoenissai, at the Persian capital of Susa, thus ensuring concentration on the Persian point of view.

Like the rest of the Oresteia the theme of Agamemnon is retribution, a theme which even in this single play spans more than one generation and embraces a complex interaction of human and divine combined with an element of family curse. Paradoxically, however, of the vast perspective that Agamemnon presents in terms of time and space it has not been events actually portrayed upon the stage that have attracted most attention so much as their antecedents, described by chorus and characters alike often in graphically enigmatic terms. The fact, however, that so much of the overall effect depends upon description and interpretation of past events by characters and groups intimately involved in them itself raises important questions for the reaction of the audience. Are we for instance to take the description of what took place at Aulis as objective truth or as subjective and flawed rationalization, hedged around with ambiguous nuances and constituting yet another element in that aura of unease which surrounds so much of the action? Further complication arises from the actual chronological presentation of motivating forces. Consistently it is the human aspect which appears first, naturally so since it is this that establishes personal guilt and sows the seed of future retribution, but that human motivation is often subsequently portrayed as concomitant with the will of heaven and coincident with the curse on the House of Atreus. Take for instance the theme of Atreus’ treatment of his brother Thyestes which ultimately serves as the background to the present generation’s bout of bloodletting. Though it underscores historically and morally much of what we see and hear in Agamemnon, it comes to the fore only in the Cassandra scene, long after the introduction of Iphigeneia and Troy, and receives its most telling expression from the lips of Aegisthus, whose specious use of it to justify murder compounds rather than resolves the cycle of retribution. The effect throughout the play is thus a constantly shifting basis of perspective, producing in scholarly assessments of the action a stark divergence of opinion typified at the extremes by the dichotomy between literal and symbolic approaches to the text.

Over the past fifty or more years study of Prometheus has been virtually dominated by a single topic: its disputed authenticity. The possibility of the play being spurious either in part or in whole, first raised by R. Westphal in 1869, has received its most detailed and telling expression this century first from W. Schmid in 1929, more recently from M. Griffith in 1977. The aim of both was to demonstrate that on almost every level of composition – structure, staging, style, language, and metre – Prometheus deviates significantly from Aeschylean technique as revealed in the other six plays. In Schmid’s case the arbitrary nature of much of his argumentation proved the greatest weakness of his thesis, allowing later defenders of authenticity – the majority of Aeschylean scholars in fact – to dismiss his findings rather than refute them. Griffith in contrast has been more cautious and thus more effective, willing to recognize the lesson of Supplices: ‘the discovery tomorrow of a scrap of papyrus, confirming Aeschylus as author, would in no way astonish me.’ At the same time, however, his own claim to greater objectivity in the choice of criteria has not been without its critics, and it is the essential subjectivity of any approach to the question of authenticity that proves the major stumbling-block to consensus.

Though scholars may disagree over the interpretation of Prometheus, no one can deny the existence of serious problems in the play. Individually each is open to explanation either by extension of what is seen in the undisputed plays, or by reference to the exigencies of the action portrayed or the circumstances of staging. Cumulatively, however, recourse to special pleading becomes embarrassingly obtrusive.