Capitolo 1
FOUR PLAYS OF AESCHYLUS
THE SUPPLIANT YOUNG GIRL
THE PERSIANS
THE SEVEN AGAINST THEBES
THE BORDER OF PROMETHEUS
TRANSLATED IN TOWARD ENGLISH FROM E.D.A. MORSHEAD, MA.
INTRODUCTION
The plays sopravviventis of Aeschylus are seven in number, although he is
believed to almost have written one hundred during his/her life of
sixty-nine years, from 525 A.Cs. to 456 A.Cs. What he fought to
Marathon in 490, and to Salamis in the 480 A.C. it is an it strongly accredited
tradition, made almost certain from the vivid references to both
battles in his/her play of _The Persians_ that you/he/she was produced in 472.
But its first existing play was, probably, not _The Persians_ but
Suppliant _The Maidens_--a mythical play, the fame of what it has
is widely eclipsed by the historical interest of _The Persians_,
and it is undoubtedly the known minimum and the less one it concerned of the seven.
His/her theme--the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt to Argos,
to escape from a forced wedding with their first-cousins,
the children of Aegyptus--it is legendary, and the lyric element
it predominates as a whole in the play. We have to hold us we remembered to
what a the Athenian and ancient custom to introduce plays in _Trilogies_-
--or, in three distribution of plays consecutive with different stages
of a legend--it probably was not uniform: it survives, for us, in the one
you only quote an example viz. the Trilogy of Orestean, understanding the _Agamemnon_,
the _Libation-Bearers_ and the _Eumenides_ or _Furies_. This
Trilogy is the masterpiece of the Play of Aeschylean: the four
remaining plays of the poet that you/he/she is translated in this volume are
all fragment of lost Trilogies--that is to say, the plays are
you complete as _poems_, but in respect to the greatest sketch of their poet
it is fragments; they had once predecessors, or follows of what only
some words or lines, or you paragraph short, survives. It is not
certainly, but it seems probable, that the first of this individual
completed plays are Suppliant _The Maidens_, and on that supposition