|
"This volume, written by a team of scholars that includes some of the most prominent senior Aeschyleans alongside extraordinarily accomplished younger scholars, is intended to explore, in so far as a single book can, every aspect of Aeschylus's art, including the historical, intellectual, and cultural milieu from which his work emerged (Section 1); the plays themselves examined from many and varied perspectives (Section 2); and a broad range of topics in the reception of Aeschylus from antiquity to the present day (Section 3). It is the first such comprehensive, mutli-authored work in English dedicated to the first surviving Greek tragedian. Jacques Bromberg synthesizes the contents of the volume in his Epilogue, whereas this Introduction is meant simply to set the scene. It examines the sources of our information about the man himself and his career in order to suggest what we can know and reasonably surmise about his life, and offer an initial assessment of his significance, above all the significance of his contributions to the history of drama. Aeschylus comes onto the scene, not at the very beginning of the Athenian tragic theater but close enough to it to be regarded as the essential founding figure. The surviving corpus of his work consists of six complete plays-less than ten percent of his production and all dating from the last two decades of his long career-and Prometheus Bound, which is likely not his. In addition, there are somewhat fewer than five-hundred fragments longer than a single word or isolated phrase. The enormous admiration and popularity which he enjoyed in his lifetime and through the fifth century BCE yielded later to the consensus that Sophocles was the more perfect artist and Euripides the more exciting and intellectually challenging playwright, but Aeschylus's role in the development of tragedy was never forgotten. Here, for example, is the image of Aeschylus brought to mind in, of all places, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a novelistic account of the supposed miracles and travels of a first-century CE sage written by Philostratus in the early third century"--
|
