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Personnages
Eschyle
Eleusis, 525 av. J. - C. - Froze, 456 av. J. - C.
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The filled playwright of honorsGreek tragic poet. Eschyle in Aiskhulos Greek. Eschyle was oldest of the three large Greek playwrights. Born from a noble family, it fought in Marathon, and undoubtedly in Salamine and Platées. Winner thirteen times in the dramatic contests, it was filled honors by the Athenians. Hiéron, tyrant of Syracuse, called it near him. After the death of Hiéron, it remained in Sicily and died in Gela in its seventieth year. Its tomb became a kind of place of pilgrimage for the poets and yet its famous epitaph did not mention its literary fame:
“Under this monument to lie Eschyle, son of Euphorion, Athenian. He died in the fertile countryside of Froze; its value is famous. The wood of Marathon can say it, and also Mède with long hair: they know it.”
The Athenians returned particular honors to him: the Lycurgue speaker made him draw up a bronze statue; its tragedies, copied with the expenses of the city, then deposited in a temple, were entrusted to the guard of a public clerk. An anecdote told by Valère Maxime, and taken again by the Fountain (but which does not deserve any credit), allots its death to the fall of a tortoise removed by an eagle which dropped it in the name of poet.
Innovative work
The work of Eschyle roots in the tradition. Eschyle had a thorough knowledge of the work of Homère, cycle of the poets who claim themselves of Hésiode, the lyric Greeks and in particular of Solon. The dramatic poem existed certainly before Eschyle, but it made deep modifications there. One undoubtedly does not owe him the invention of the mask, the tragic coat and the buskin, as Horace in his Epistle with the Rammers affirms it; but before him, there would have been in scene, with the chorus, one actor, who enters two songs declaimed his account, and Eschyle would have been the first to introduce a second character. The dialog became thus the principal element of the tragedy; the chorus held a less place in the action, and its songs, which had constituted the essential part of the drama, were nothing any more but the accompaniment.
A large theologist
Founder of the traditional tragedy, Eschyle was also a large theologist. Like points out it Karl Reinhardt, dramaturgy and theology find in the work of Eschyle, primarily religious poet, a relation which one will not find at Sophocle, even less at Euripide. Besides it is necessary to reconsider the theological aspect of this work, badly understood Christian exegetes. That it takes as a starting point legends (Begging them, the Seven against Thèbes, which takes again the legend of Odipe, and Orestie: Agamemnon; Choéphores and Euménides, that of Atrides) or actual facts (the battle of Salamine, in Persians), Eschyle treats always and exclusively relationship of the man with the divinity. Thus its connected Prométhée, where he interprets the myth of Titan by renewing it, is not, as thought it Goethe or Shelley, a founder of culture or the liberator of humanity, even less one “punished rebel” (Hugo) or the image of “the emancipation by the effort” (Michelet). A widespread thesis also wants that the theater of Eschyle reflected an evolution inside the Greek religion, marked by an appeasing of the divinity within a relation righter of Olympian and the Human one.
One forgets thus that this antiquated theater is a theater of crowned terror, based on a true policy of the fear: “Which thus, man or quoted, if it is nothing under the sky whose fear lives in its heart, would keep the respect which it owes with justice?” pronounce terrible Erinyes (Euménides). Eschyle is a contemporary of the medic wars and furious rise of the Athenian people. It shows everywhere the horror of the war (Seven against Thèbes, Persians) and of the human condition in general. However, Zeus, irresponsible and madly cruel tyrant, fall under the same need as Prométhée, its torture victim; they condition and are complementary one the other. “Violence” is the condition of the “grace”, the all-powerful ignorance of Olympian faces the impotent knowledge of Titan. Thus, it is the perenniality of this relation, whose cruelty is transcendent with the clean direction, which founds the tragedy. This is why, at Eschyle, Prométhée, before even fire, gives to the men the plugging hope, i.e. the power to close the eyes on their own finitude. The Divine one and the Human one becomes at Eschyle complementary figures; thus is dramatically solved the contradiction which haunted presocratic philosophy.
An imposing language
The language of Eschyle is as imposing as its subjects: its style is energetic, bold, fast, with extraordinary epithets. Its lyricism is impetuous, rich in daring images. Nietzsche precisely described it as “Dionysiac lord”.
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