The Persians

“The city-sacking army of the King

has now passed over to the neighbor land on the other

side of the water,

crossing the strait of Helle, daughter of Athamas,

by means of a boat-bridge tied together with flaxen cables

placing a roadway, fastened with many bolts, as a yoke

on the neck of the sea.”

The chorus describes the boat bridge built by Xerxes to cross into Greece. This bridge spanned the Hellespont, the modern day Dardanelles or Strait of Gallipoli. In the play, it is both a symbol of the might of the Persian fleet and an act of hubris that causes their defeat at Salamis.

“But what man can escape

the guileful deception of a god?”

Ancient Greek tragedies are typically set in the world of myth and epic, where mortals must navigate the whims of a pantheon of gods, each with differing motivations and interests. Here, although Aeschylus writes about events that took place in recent history rather a legendary past, he does not deviate from the trope of hubris punished. While Xerxes thought himself a clever military leader, the gods remained on the side of the Greeks—an insurmountable obstacle.

“All hail, my Queen, most exalted among the slim-waisted

women of Persia, venerable mother of Xerxes and wife of

Darius! You were the spouse of one who was a god to the

Persians, and you are the mother of their god too, unless our

old protecting power has now changed sides against our

army.”

The chorus addresses Atossa, Queen Mother and consort of former king Darius. This passage indicates that Persian rulers were treated as gods by their people—at least according to Aeschylus, who juxtaposes the authoritarian model of Persian governance with Athenian democracy.

“I will tell you

a saying which is not my own creation but has come down

from our ancestors, and which causes me to be very fearful,

my friends: that great wealth may make the dust rise from the ground by tripping up the prosperity that Darius, not

without the aid of some god, had built up.”

Atossa is anxious that Xerxes has squandered the wealth and success of the Persian Empire in his campaign against Greece. The spirit of Darius confirms her fears, echoing her words.

“There seemed to come into my sight

two finely dressed women—one arrayed in Persian, the other

in Doric robes, outstandingly superior in stature to the

women of real life, of flawless beauty and sisters of the same

stock: one, by fall of the lot, was a native and inhabitant of the land of Greece, the other of the Orient.”

Atossa’s dream depicts her son, Xerxes, attempting to yoke two women of mythic stature to his chariot. This dream proves prophetic; the woman representing Greece breaks her yoke and throws Xerxes from his chariot, foreshadowing his defeat at the Battle of Salamis.

“Then I saw an eagle fleeing for

refuge to the altar of Phoebus—and I was rooted speechless

to the spot with terror, my friends. Next I saw a hawk

swooping on him at full speed with beating wings and tearing

at his head with its talons—and he simply cowered and submitted.”

The omen of the hawk attacking an eagle that Atossa sees upon waking from her prophetic dream compounds her anxieties for her son. As the augury is interpreted, the larger eagle—a bird often symbolizing monarchical power—represents Persia, while the smaller hawk stands for Greece. Like the queen’s dream, this foreshadows the news of Xerxes’ defeat.

“The shores of Salamis, and all the regions near

them, are full of corpses wretchedly slain.”

Xerxes’ invasion of Greece turns into a total rout when a double agent tricks him into believing the Greeks plan to flee. The overly confident Xerxes is an easy mark: The false spy simply tells him what he wants to hear, and there are none to speak truth to power. In the battle, the Greek ships decimate the Persian fleet and the shipwrecked survivors are slaughtered in the open sea. Proper burial of the dead was highly important in Greek society; the image of unburied dead strewn on the sea and shore serves as a rare, horrific imprecation to Greek brutality.

“Chorus: Ah, how I groan when I remember Athens!

Messenger: She is indeed hateful to her foes:

we can remember well

how many Persian women they caused

to be bereaved and widowed, all for nothing.”

Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis is a painful reminder of his father Darius’s earlier defeat at Marathon, a battle in which Aeschylus himself fought. This quote is an example of Aeschylus’s nationalism, playing up the military might of his nation-state.

“Come on, sons of the Greeks, for the freedom of your homeland,

for the freedom of your children, your wives, the

temples of your fathers’ gods, and the tombs of your ancestors!

Now all is at stake!”

At Salamis, the Persians fought for colonial conquest, while the Greeks fought to protect their homeland—a motivation that gave a morale boost to the Greek defenders, who used the terrain and geography of their archipelago to repel an invading force more than triple their number. Whereas the Greek forces were mostly comprised of well-equipped free men, many of the Persian forces were conscripts, with less motivation for victory.

“O cruel divinity, how I see you have beguiled the minds

of the Persians! My son has found his vengeance upon famous

Athens to be a bitter one; the Eastern lives that Marathon

had already destroyed were not enough for him.”

One of Xerxes’ many faults is his inability to learn from the past. His father’s loss at Marathon should have dissuaded Xerxes from invading Greece. Instead, he hubristically sought revenge and paid dearly for it.

“He thought he could stop the flow of the Hellespont,

the divine streams of the Bosporus, by putting chains

on it, as if it were a slave; he altered the nature of its passage,

put hammered fetters upon it and created a great pathway

for a great army. He thought, ill-counselled as he was, that

he, a mortal, could lord it over all the gods and over Poseidon.”

Building a bridge over Hellespont is interpreted as an affront to the sea god, Poseidon. This is an act of hubris, a common tragic flaw of many characters in Greek tragedy. Although slavery was a fact of Athenian society as well as that of Persia, with this passage—along with Atossa’s dream of Xerxes attempting to use giant women as beasts of burden—Aeschylus points to the Persians’ mistreatment of even this low caste of society.

“I tell you this plainly, my old contemporaries: take all of us together who have held this kingship, and we will not be found to have caused this much suffering.”

Though Darius also lost a battle against the Greeks, it is implied that his defeat was nowhere near the scale of Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis. Darius describes the virtues of his lineage, indicating that Xerxes has endangered the future of the Persian empire through his misstep.

“Look on at the price that is being paid for

these actions, and remember Athens and Greece: let no one despise the fortune he possesses and, through lust for more, let his prosperity go to waste.”

Aeschylus implies that Persia was so thoroughly defeated at Salamis that they will never attempt to invade Greece again. However, he wrote this knowing that history had already proved him wrong—Persia invaded Greece a third time only a year after this battle. Possibly, Aeschylus meant this forecast to be taken in the abstract rather than the concrete—eventually Persia’s might and reputation would crumble, while those of Greece would remain for all time.