_Chorus of Persian Elders_
_ARGUMENT.—When Xerxes came to the throne of Persia, remembering how his
father Dareios had sought to subdue the land of the Hellenes, and
seeking to avenge the defeat of Datis and Artaphernes on the field of
Marathon, he gathered together a mighty host of all nations under his
dominion, and led them against Hellas. And at first he prospered and
prevailed, crossed the Hellespont, and defeated the Spartans at
Thermopylæ, and took the city of Athens, from which the greater part of
its citizens had fled. But at last he and his armament met with utter
overthrow at Salamis. Meanwhile Atossa, the mother of Xerxes, with her
handmaids and the elders of the Persians, waited anxiously at Susa,
where was the palace of the great king, for tidings of her son._
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Footnote 2:
_Note._—Within two years after the battle of Salamis, the feeling of
natural exultation was met by Phrynichos in a tragedy bearing the
title of _The Phœnikians_, and having for its subject the defeat of
Xerxes. As he had come under the displeasure of the Athenian _demos_
for having brought on the stage the sufferings of their Ionian kinsmen
in his _Capture of Miletos_, he was apparently anxious to regain his
popularity by a “sensation” drama of another kind; and his success
seems to have prompted Æschylos to a like attempt five years later,
B.C. 473. The Tetralogy to which the play belonged, and which gained
the first prize on its representation, included the two tragedies
(unconnected in subject) of _Phineus_ and _Glaucos_, and the satyric
drama of _Prometheus the Fire-stealer_.
The play has, therefore, the interest of being strictly a contemporary
narrative of the battle of Salamis and its immediate consequences, by
one who may himself have been present at it, and whose brother
Ameinias (Herod, viii. 93) distinguished himself in it by a special
act of heroism. As such, making all allowance for the influence of
dramatic exigencies, and the tendency to colour history so as to meet
the tastes of patriotic Athenians, it may claim, where it differs from
the story told by Herodotos, to be a more trustworthy record. And it
has, we must remember, the interest of being the only extant drama of
its class, the only tragedy the subject of which is not taken from the
cycle of heroic myths, but from the national history of the time. Far
below the Oresteian Trilogy as it may seem to us as a work of art,
having more the character of a spectacle than a poem, it was, we may
well believe, unusually successful at the time, and it is said to have
been chosen by Hiero for reproduction in Syracuse after Æschylos had
settled there under his patronage.