The Greek lexicographer, Suidas, reports that Aeschylus wrote ninety plays.  The titles of seventy-two of these have been handed down in an ancient register.  He brought out the first of these at the age of twenty-five, and as he died at the age of sixty-nine, he wrote on an average two plays each year throughout his lifetime.  Such fertility would be incredible, were not similar facts authentically recorded of the older tragic poets of Greece.  The Greek drama, moreover, made unusual demands on the creative powers of the poet.  It was lyrical, and the lyrics were accompanied by the dance.  All these elements—­poetry, song, and dance—­the poet contributed; and we gain a new sense of the force of the word “poet” (it means “creator"), when we contemplate his triple function.  Moreover, he often “staged” the play himself, and sometimes he acted in it.  Aeschylus was singularly successful in an age that produced many great poets.  He took the first prize at least thirteen times; and as he brought out four plays at each contest, more than half his plays were adjudged by his contemporaries to be of the highest quality.  After the poet’s death, plays which he had written, but which had not been acted in his lifetime, were brought out by his sons and a nephew.  It is on record that his son Euphorion took the first prize four times with plays of his father; so the poet’s art lived after him and suffered no eclipse.

Only seven complete plays of Aeschylus are still extant.  The best present source of the text of these is a manuscript preserved in the Laurentian Library, at Florence in Italy, which was written in the tenth or eleventh century after Christ.  The number of plays still extant is small, but fortunately, among them is the only complete Greek trilogy that we possess, and luckily also the other four serve to mark successive stages in the poet’s artistic development.  The trilogy of the ‘Oresteia’ is certainly his masterpiece; in some of the other plays he is clearly seen to be still bound by the limitations which hampered the earlier writers of Greek tragedy.  In the following analysis the seven plays will be presented in their probable chronological order.

The Greeks signally defeated Xerxes in the great sea fight in the bay of Salamis, B.C. 480.  The poet made this victory the theme of his ‘Persians.’  This is the only historical Greek tragedy which we now possess:  the subjects of all the rest are drawn from mythology.  But Aeschylus had a model for his historical play in the ‘Phoenician Women’ of his predecessor Phrynichus, which dealt with the same theme.  Aeschylus, indeed, is said to have imitated it closely in the ‘Persians.’  Plagiarism was thought to be a venial fault by the ancients, just as in the Homeric times piracy was not considered a disgrace.  The scene of the play is not Athens, as one might expect, but Susa.  It opens without set prologue.  The Chorus consists of Persian elders, to whom the government of the country