The Book of Lost Books (5 page)

Aeschylus

{
c.
525–456 B.C.E.}

PTOLEMY III (247–222 B.C.E.) had a lot to live up to. His grandfather Ptolemy I had accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaigns and, on the conqueror's death, acquired the government of Egypt. There he had constructed a new wonder of the world: the Alexandrian Library. The repository grew out of Aristotle's personal library. In addition, Ptolemy I, called the Preserver, brought such scholars as Euclid the geometer and the grammarian Zenodotus to create the most distinguished academy of literary, historical, philosophical, mathematical, and astronomical knowledge in the known world. The Preserver's son Ptolemy II secured and expanded the library. According to tradition, to satisfy his desire that the library should be the most complete as well as the most prestigious, he employed seventy Jewish scholars to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. Such endeavors require peace, and Ptolemy II brokered a treaty with the Romans and forged a dynastic alliance with the erstwhile enemy of the Egyptians, Antiochus II of Syria, by giving his daughter Berenice in marriage.

So, in time, Ptolemy III inherited a legacy of military security and intellectual esteem, along with the urge to outdo his ancestors and further extend the glory of Egypt. As luck would have it, Antiochus II callously divorced and poisoned Berenice as soon as Ptolemy II died, and Ptolemy III waged a war of vengeance, subduing Asia from Mesopotamia to Babylon and recapturing statues of deities stolen throughout the wars between Egypt and Persia. He conquered deep into the south, as far as Ethiopia, and developed a powerful maritime fleet. The garlands of victory were all very well, no doubt, but his predecessors were praised as men of letters as well as heroic conquerors. Ptolemy III turned his attentions to the library.

Cataloguing the library's 200,000 scrolls began in earnest, and an anomaly of unthinkable proportions was discovered. Pharaoh had no Aeschylus. That the “Cage of the Muses,” as some referred to the library, lacked a complete text of the most revered Athenian dramatist seemed an unforgivable oversight. Obtaining it would provide the perfect demonstration that Ptolemy III had accomplished what Ptolemy II and Ptolemy I had failed to do. Alexandria would have its Aeschylus.

The Athenians had the only copy of
The Complete Works of Aeschylus
in existence. After, one assumes, protracted negotiations, it was agreed that these revered scrolls might be transported to Alexandria for scholars to make an accurate copy, and then returned to Athens. To ensure that this agreement was honored, Ptolemy III would deposit fifteen silver talents with the Athenians, repayable when the text was brought back intact. This was a phenomenal amount of money: the entire annual Jewish tribute payment amounted to only twenty silver talents, and that had driven them close to rebellion. Following the agreement, the manuscript arrived in Alexandria.

Did the idea arise in Ptolemy's own mind? Did a librarian impress upon his pharaoh exactly what they had? This was the sole complete copy of Aeschylus in existence. It was a unicum, a nonpareil, a one and only. It was the Golden Fleece, it was Helen of Troy's wedding ring, it was the ball of string that Theseus unraveled in the Labyrinth. It was worth losing fifteen silver talents. How could the Athenians protest against the Vanquisher of Syria?

The scripts stayed in Alexandria, with a strict injunction that no copy should ever be made. And then Ptolemy III died. Later, Ptolemy XIII died. Finally, the empire died. Their religion died. But the original manuscript remained: it, and its singularity, preserved. Since its transcription was forbidden, scholars flocked from around the known world and from every intellectual background to read it: Plotinus the Neo-Platonist, Clement of Alexandria, Diodorus of Sicily, Nepotian of Africa, even Aelian, who notoriously hated travel. Some came to marvel at the poetic majesty; others came to ponder whether, in a line from
Prometheus
Bound,
“Nothing will make me reveal the name of the God to come who is greater than Zeus,” Aeschylus had had an out-of-time inkling of Christianity. None of them quibbled with the centuries-old piece of self-important petulance that kept the manuscript there.

On December 22, 640 C.E., a reader with a very different agenda was in control of Alexandria. His aesthetics were strict: “Those which disagree with the Word of God are blasphemous, those which agree, superfluous.” Amrou ibn el-Ass, on direct orders from the caliph, decreed that the library be burned. The scrolls opened a final time, unfurled before the unscholarly eyes of flame, and
The Complete Works of Aeschylus
became lost forever.

One of the more astonishing examples of acquired behavior in the animal kingdom occurs in the eagles of southeast Europe. As documented by the ornithologist Grubač, these birds not only have adapted to their habitat, but also make active use of their environment. One of the primary sources of nutrition in harsh, rocky climates, along with hedge-hogs, Boback marmosets, and large-toothed susliks, is the tortoise. The eagles have been observed, gliding at low altitude, to drop suddenly into a plunging attack, and curl their talons around the rim of the tortoise's shell. They then soar to upwards of one hundred meters, and drop their catch onto round, exposed stones in order to split the shell. With the protective armor of its quarry shattered, the eagle can then eviscerate its prey with relative ease.

Just such an incident occurred in 456 B.C.E., outside the city of Gela, on the island of Sicily. The eagle would have glimpsed its prey and swooped. Still scanning the terrain, it located a suitable rock on which to crack the casing. As the bird's claws withdrew, the tortoise would have briefly experienced a hitherto-unimaginable sense of acceleration, before being splintered and mangled. One variable, however, turned this instance of sophisticated predation into a much more remarkable occasion. It was no rock that the tortoise hurtled toward, but the bald head of an elderly Greek named Aeschylus. He was killed outright. History does not record the fate of the tortoise.

Luckily, Aeschylus had already written his epitaph. Like most Greeks of his age, he was proud of his status as a “Marathonomachos,” a veteran of the battle in 490 B.C.E. where the Athenians repelled the Persian king Darius' invasion.

This tomb the dust of Aeschylus doth hide,
Euphorion's son and fruitful Gela's pride,
How tried his valor, Marathon may tell,
And long-haired Medes, who got the point full well.

He failed, however, to mention he was also the most revered playwright of his age, and that he had single-handedly transformed the nature of drama.

Aeschylus was born around 525 B.C.E. near Eleusis, a site sacred to the goddess Demeter, to which pilgrims would travel to be initiated into her cult, known as the Mysteries. As a counterbalance to the shrouded secrecy of the chthonian rites at Eleusis, Peisistratus, the relatively enlightened tyrant of Athens, had established forms of public worship, including an annual dramatic festival, sacred to Dionysus and performed in the heart of the city. By the time of Aeschylus, the Dionysian festival had mutated into a theatrical competition, and though to an extent it had become secularized, it was nonetheless rooted in religious significance.

According to the geographer Pausanias, Aeschylus had been commanded to become a writer by the god Dionysus. Apparently, on one occasion, the young dramaturge had been given the rather bemusing task of keeping an eye on some ripening grapes. As might be expected, he nodded off, and the wine god–cum–career adviser appeared in a dream to inform him of his new vocation. The next day he wrote a tragedy, with, so Pausanias claims, remarkable ease. His first plays were performed in the 480s; by 484, he had been awarded first place in the dramatic competition.

In Aristophanes' play
The Frogs,
the irreverent satirist presents a debate in the Underworld between Aeschylus and the younger playwright Euripides. Although one must allow for a degree of caricature, and given that Aristophanes was born after Aeschylus had died, it still provides a glimpse into what was perceived to be his personality. He was irascible and conservative, a staunch believer in the power of drama to inspire military glory and civic duty. In contrast to Euripides, Aeschylus was the laureate of masculine heroism rather than feminine psychopathy. Some mocked his language for being grandiloquent, highfalutin, and abounding in such recondite concatenations as “hippococks” and “goatstags.” To others, Aeschylus' style was rugged yet ornate, chiseled with gravitas.

In his lifetime, Aeschylus wrote over eighty plays. Only seven have survived, with copious fragments either persisting on papyrus or preserved in commentaries. The anonymous, though not conspicuously unreliable,
Life of Aeschylus
makes clear his significance:

Whoever thinks that Sophocles was the more effective composer of tragedies, thinks correctly, but let him consider how much more difficult it was in the time of Thespis, Choerilus and Phrynicus to bring tragedy up to such a level of greatness than it was for one entering the scene at the time of Aeschylus to bring it to the perfection of a Sophocles.

Before Aeschylus, drama had been more akin to a quasi-liturgical recitation or an oratorio. Thespis, according to Plutarch, was the first to add a
hypokrites,
an actor impersonating a character, who stood on a raised platform above the orchestra, where the Chorus would dance and sing hymns. Drama began when Thespis stood apart from the Chorus and announced, “I am the God Dionysus.”

The next development has been documented in the lost works of Phrynicus. Here, the solo actor would play a number of different roles, though the action was still predominantly performed through soliloquy. The major innovation introduced by Aeschylus was the presence of a second actor. The effect of this cannot be underestimated: monologue became dialogue, and with it the possibility for dramatic conflict, argument, irony, and reconciliation arose. It is for this reason Aeschylus is called the father of modern drama.

Aeschylus was also acclaimed as an innovator in his addition of elaborate stage machinery and painted effects. His actors were decked out in flowing robes, raised buskin shoes, and more ornate masks. He changed the role of the Chorus from passive commentators to integral participants in the drama, and, although his capacity for innovation may have waned, his willingness to respond to new theatrical practices did not. Sophocles introduced a third actor onto the stage, and in Aeschylus' final, most acclaimed work,
The Oresteia,
he used this new triangle of players rather than the former limitation to protagonist and antagonist.

For all his radical advances, Aeschylus owed a debt to his predecessors. No genius emerges ex nihilo, and it is possible to discern the hints of influence from Phrynicus on his development. Phrynicus wrote works set in the sphere of contemporary history: one example,
The Capture of
Miletus,
apparently so distressed the Athenians, and needled their sense of shame for allowing the Persian destruction of that city, that it was forbidden to be restaged, all copies were destroyed, and Phrynicus was fined. Out of pocket but unbowed in principle, he went on to write another,
The Women of Pleuron,
and another,
The Persians.

Only one line of Phrynicus'
The Persians
remains. Aeschylus used exactly the same opening line for his identically titled play—“Behold, most of the Persians have already set forth for Greece!”—yet the play that follows goes on to become his own. Aeschylus' experience at Marathon and Salamis added telling details, such as the bodies of the drowned Medes held afloat by their oriental robes.

At the first performance of Aeschylus'
The Persians,
the role of Chorus leader was taken by Pericles, the aspiring democrat who would rise to govern Athens at the height of its cultural, political, and military significance. Pericles and Aeschylus were both aware that Themistocles, the victorious and aristocratic general at Marathon, had taken the role of Chorus leader for Phrynicus'
The Persians.
The play may not have been conceived as agitprop: that did not prevent it from being deployed for political ends. Throughout Aeschylus' career there is a creative tension between myth and contemporary relevance.

Aeschylus was invited by the tyrant Hieron, ruler of Sicily and one of the few leaders whose military capability and cultural clout could rival that of Athens, to produce
The Persians
in Sicily in 471 B.C.E. It was not the playwright's first visit to the court. Five years previously, he had moved there, furious at having been defeated by the young Sophocles. On that occasion, he wrote
The Women of Etna,
now lost, to commemorate Hieron's construction of a new city. A description of Mount Etna's eruption may have acted as a source for the conclusion of
Prometheus
Bound,
where “dust dances in a whirling fountain” and “fiery lightning twists and flashes.” Hieron wished to be remembered as a patron of the arts, and cultivated men of genius. It was under his despotic rule, rather than in democratic Athens, that Aeschylus chose to live out his retirement, after the success of his masterpiece,
The Oresteia.