GREEK TRAGEDY AESCHYLUSwas born of a noble family at Eleusis near Athens in 525BC . He took part in the Persian Wars, and his epitaph, said to have been written by himself, represents him as fighting at Marathon. At some time in his life he appears to have been prosecuted for divulging the Eleusinian mysteries, but he apparently proved himself innocent. Aeschylus wrote more than seventy plays, of which seven have survived:The Suppliants, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, The ChoephoriandThe Eumenides. He visited Syracuse more than once at the invitation of Hieron I and he died at Gela in Sicily in 456BC . Aeschylus was recognized as a classic writer soon after his death, and special privileges were decreed for his plays. ARISTOPHANES, an Athenian citizen, was born inc. 448–445BC and died between 387 and 380BC . Little is known about his life, but there is a portrait of him in Plato’sSymposium. He is presented as a well-liked and convivial person, who ‘divides his time between Aphrodite and Dionysus’. His eleven surviving comedies areArcharnians(425),Knights(424),Clouds(423),Wasps(422), Peace(421),Birds(414),Lysistrata(411),The Thesmophoriazusae(411),Frogs (405),The Ecclesiazusae(c. 392) andPlautus(388). ARISTOTLE was born at Stagira, in the dominion of the kings of Macedonia, in 384BC . For twenty years he studied at Athens in the Academy of Plato, on whose death in 347 he left, and, some time later, became tutor of the young Alexander the Great. When Alexander succeeded to the throne of Macedonia in 335, Aristotle returned to Athens and established his school and research institute, the Lyceum, to which his great erudition attracted a large number of scholars.AfterAlexander’sdeathin323,anti-Macedonianfeelingdrove Aristotle out of Athens, and he fled to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322. His writings, which were of extraordinary range, profoundly affected the whole course of ancient and medieval philosophy, and they are still eagerly studied and debated by philosophers today. Very many of them have survived and among the most famous are theEthicsand thePolitics, both of which are published in Penguin Classics, together withThe Athenian Constitution, De Anima, The Art of
RhetoricandPoetics. EURIPIDESwas an Athenianborn in 484BC . A memberof a familyof considerable rank, he avoided public duties as far as possible, and devoted his life to the work of a dramatist. His popularity is attested by the survival of seventeen of his plays and by abundant other evidence; though it was partly due to his audience’s inability to penetrate the irony of his character-drawing. His unpopularity is equally clear from the constant attacks made upon him in the comedies of Aristophanes, and by the fact that in fifty years he was awarded first prize only four or five times. At the age of seventy-three he found it necessary to leave Athens; he went into voluntary exile at the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon. It was during these last months that he wrote what many consider his greatest work,The Bacchae
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