The Complete Plays of Aeschylus (Annotated)

All Seven Surviving Tragedies — Including the Complete Oresteia and Prometheus Bound — with a Critical Study

By: Aeschylus

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This annotated edition includes:

• A 16,000-word critical study of Aeschylus and the birth of tragedy
• The complete Oresteia — the only surviving Greek trilogy
• All seven surviving plays, including Prometheus Bound
• A life of Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BCE), the soldier of Marathon
• The Plumptre verse translation, public domain worldwide

Before Aeschylus, there was no drama. One actor faced a chorus, and nothing could happen. He added a second — and with two figures who could disagree, tragedy, and the whole of theatre after it, was born.

Aeschylus is the oldest of the great tragedians and the father of the form, a veteran of Marathon whose epitaph, by his own wish, recorded that he had fought the Persians and said nothing of his plays. This volume gathers all seven of his tragedies that survive — a fragment of the seventy or more he wrote, and nearly the whole of what the ancient world let us keep.

At its heart stands the Oresteia — Agamemnon, The Libation-Pourers, and The Eumenides — the only complete trilogy to come down to us from Greek antiquity, and one of the supreme achievements of the human mind: the story of a house drowning in inherited blood, of a king murdered in his bath and a son who must kill his mother to avenge him, and finally of the moment when a goddess halts the endless chain of vengeance by inventing the law court — turning the pursuing Furies into the guardians of justice. It is nothing less than the mythic birth of civilization out of the blood feud.

Here too is Prometheus Bound, the Titan chained to a rock for the crime of giving fire and hope to mankind; the war drama Seven Against Thebes; the oldest surviving play in the world, The Persians; and The Suppliants. This Erato Press edition gives all seven in the public-domain verse translation of E. H. Plumptre, and surrounds them with a substantial critical study — of Aeschylus the innovator, of the Oresteia's vision of justice, and of the cosmic grandeur that sets him apart from every dramatist since — with a life of the poet. The beginning of tragedy, entire, in one volume.