Aeschylus — Wellsprings

Aeschylus

c. 525 BCE–c. 456 BCE · Athens

Aeschylus (c. 525 – c. 456 BCE) was an Athenian tragedian, the earliest of the three canonical Greek tragic dramatists (with Sophocles and Euripides) whose works survive. He is credited with expanding the dramatic form by introducing a second actor, reducing the role of the chorus, and enabling sustained dialogue and conflict on stage. About seven of his estimated seventy to ninety plays survive, including Seven Against Thebes and the Oresteia trilogy, of which Libation Bearers (Choephoroi) is the second part. He fought at the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) and likely at Salamis (480 BCE); his Persians, produced in 472 BCE, is the oldest surviving play. He died at Gela in Sicily.

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Did you know?

Before he was a playwright, Aeschylus fought the Persians
Athens' first great tragedian began as a soldier. Aeschylus fought at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE — where his own brother Cynegeirus was killed — and, by tradition, again at the sea-battle of Salamis in 480 BCE. His self-composed epitaph boasts only of his valor at Marathon and says nothing at all about the plays that made him famous.
How we know
Aeschylus c. 525–456 BCE; Marathon 490 BCE (brother Cynegeirus died there, Herodotus 6.114); Salamis 480 BCE by the ancient Life of Aeschylus; the epitaph names only Marathon.

Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→

Stop 1 of 1525 BCE–456 BCELived

AthensAttica (Greece)

What they did here

Athenian tragedian; competed at the City Dionysia.

About Athens

Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.

In Athens at the same time

Themistocles, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Euripides, Antiphon, Socrates

See other sages who lived in Athens→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Aeschylus’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

Themistocles, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Euripides, Antiphon, Socrates, Prodicus, Democritus, Thucydides, Critias

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Aeschylus’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.