Aeschylus was born at Eleusis, northwest of Athens, around 525 or 524 BCE. His father, Euphorion, belonged to the Eupatridai, the old Athenian nobility. The family seems to have possessed land and local standing, and Aeschylus himself was connected from birth with Eleusis, one of the most important sanctuaries of the Greek world. Later tradition says that he served the goddesses of the Eleusinian Mysteries and was nearly killed on stage for revealing a secret of the cult. That story may preserve his association with Eleusinian religion, but its details are uncertain. His brother Cynaegirus certainly fought at Marathon and died there while trying to seize a Persian ship.

His epitaph, quoted by Pausanias, gives the ancient picture of his identity. Beneath the stone lay Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian, who died in the wheat-bearing land of Gela. His noble prowess could be witnessed by the grove of Marathon and by the long-haired Persian. The inscription makes no claim that he invented tragedy, won dramatic prizes or taught Athens to watch suffering on stage. For Aeschylus or his family, military service remained the proof of a man's worth.

Aeschylus made his first recorded dramatic production in 499 BCE. His first victory at the City Dionysia came only in 484, a delay of fifteen years that suggests how fiercely the early dramatic competitions were contested. Ancient biographical tradition credits him with thirteen first prizes at Athens, while the Suda gives a higher total of twenty-eight victories that may include other festivals. In 468 BCE he was defeated by the young Sophocles, an event later tradition treated as a shocking reversal. Yet his career remained dominant for more than forty years.

His life belonged to the age of the Persian Wars. At Marathon in 490 BCE, Athens and Plataea defeated the army of Darius. Herodotus says that Aeschylus's brother Cynaegirus lost his hand while gripping a Persian ship and died in the fighting. Aeschylus himself is generally believed to have served at Salamis in 480 BCE, where the Greek fleet destroyed the Persian navy. The Persians, performed in 472 BCE, gives the battle a soldier's attention to straits, ships, landings, cries and drowning men. Its tragic imagination is informed by participation rather than distant report.

Aeschylus also travelled. He visited Sicily more than once and was connected with the court of Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse. Ancient tradition associates him with the foundation of Aetna and says that he presented The Persians at Syracuse and composed The Women of Aetna for the new city. His final years were spent in Sicily. The chronographers place his death at Gela in 456 or 455 BCE. The story that an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a rock suitable for breaking the shell, is an ancient joke rather than history. At Gela he received public burial, and his tomb became a place of poetic pilgrimage.

His place in the history of Greek theatre rests on more than survival. Before Aeschylus, according to the tradition inherited by Aristotle, tragedy had one actor and a chorus. The actor could move between roles but could not sustain a dialogue with another character on stage at the same time. Aeschylus added a second actor, the deuteragonist, making face-to-face dramatic conflict possible. He reduced the proportion of choral performance and gave more weight to spoken dialogue. He also served as his own producer, trainer of choruses and probably actor, mastering masks, costume, music, dance, staging and visual effect.

The plays of Aeschylus were usually produced in a tetralogy: three tragedies followed by a satyr play. A tetralogy shared a day at the City Dionysia and was judged as a group. Aeschylus was particularly famous for connected trilogies in which the tragedies formed chapters of one story. The Oresteia is the only such trilogy to survive entire. Lost evidence shows that he repeatedly built large narratives across plays: the fall of Laius and Oedipus led to Seven Against Thebes; the flight of Danaus led to mass marriage and trial; the punishment of Prometheus continued through release and fire-bearing; the story of Achilles moved from withdrawal to the death of Patroclus and the ransom of Hector.

His six securely attributed tragedies must be listed before anything else. The Persians was produced in 472 BCE and won first prize. It is the earliest surviving Greek tragedy and the only extant Greek tragedy based on a recent historical event rather than myth. The action takes place at the Persian court of Susa. Atossa, mother of Xerxes, awaits news of the great expedition against Greece. A messenger reports the destruction of the Persian fleet at Salamis. Atossa summons the ghost of Darius, who interprets the defeat as divine punishment for Xerxes' hubris in yoking the Hellespont and treating the sea as though it were a slave. Xerxes returns in rags, and the play closes in lamentation.

The Persians does not present the battle from the victorious Greek side. It forces the Athenian audience to watch the enemy's grief. Persian elders mourn sons; Atossa asks where they died; the messenger describes bodies floating in the sea; Xerxes enters broken. The play's concentration on Persian suffering does not remove its Athenian triumphalism, but it turns triumph into pity and terror. Its lesson is not that Persians are less human. It is that imperial pride, unlimited wealth and contempt for divine boundaries destroy even the most powerful king.

Seven Against Thebes was produced in 467 BCE as the third tragedy of a connected Theban trilogy. The first two plays, Laius and Oedipus, are lost; the satyr play The Sphinx followed. Seven begins with Eteocles defending Thebes against the army raised by his brother Polynices. One by one, seven Argive champions advance against the seven gates. A messenger describes each warrior's shield and boasts. Eteocles assigns a defender to every gate, until he learns that Polynices stands at the seventh. Father's curse, brother against brother and city against family come together in a single combat. Eteocles and Polynices kill each other.

The ending once closed with a choral lament for the brothers. A later producer added a scene in which Antigone and Ismene mourn, a herald announces Creon's prohibition of Polynices' burial and Antigone declares that she will bury him despite the decree. That addition, probably composed after Sophocles' Antigone, is not Aeschylean in style. It anticipates the plot of Sophocles but does not belong to the original ending.

The Suppliants was long thought to be Aeschylus's earliest surviving play because of its large chorus and simple action. Ancient production records place it in 463 BCE, making it later than Seven Against Thebes. The Danaids, daughters of Danaus, flee from Egypt to Argos to escape forced marriage with their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus. They carry suppliant branches and sit at the altars of the Argive gods. Danaus asks King Pelasgus for protection. Pelasgus faces a terrible choice: receive the suppliants and risk war with Egypt, or reject them and violate Zeus, god of suppliants. The Argive people decide to grant protection.

The Suppliants is a play about the city as a political community. Pelasgus does not act as an absolute king. He lays the decision before the people, and the demos accepts the danger. The Danaids form a chorus of fifty women and dominate the stage with their fear, song and argument. The lost second play, The Egyptians, apparently dramatised the arrival of the sons of Aegyptus; the lost third, The Danaids, presented the mass murder of the bridegrooms and the trial of Hypermnestra, who alone spared her husband Lynceus. The satyr play Amymone may have treated the Danaid's encounter with Poseidon. Aeschylus's Aphrodite apparently appeared in the trial to defend the marriage bond and erotic union. The trilogy would have moved from supplication and political asylum to murder, judgement and reconciliation.

The Oresteia, produced in 458 BCE, is Aeschylus's final surviving work and the only complete connected trilogy of Greek tragedy. Its three plays are Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides; the accompanying satyr play Proteus is lost. Together they dramatise the passage from private blood vengeance to public trial and civic order. The trilogy is not simply the story of the house of Atreus. It is a sequence in which every act of justice creates new pollution, every punishment demands another punishment, and the city of Athens must finally transform vengeance into law.

Agamemnon opens with a watchman seeing the beacon that announces the fall of Troy. Clytemnestra commands the stage, ordering sacrifices, describing the beacon relay and ruling the city in her husband's absence. Agamemnon returns with Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess Apollo has cursed. Clytemnestra persuades him to walk upon costly purple fabrics, an act of hubris that foreshadows his death. Cassandra sees the past and future of the house: Thyestes' children, Iphigenia's sacrifice, Clytemnestra's axe. Agamemnon enters the palace and is murdered. Clytemnestra appears over the bodies and defends her act as vengeance for Iphigenia.

The Libation Bearers brings Orestes home. He and Pylades approach Agamemnon's tomb and encounter Electra and the women of the chorus, who carry libations ordered by Clytemnestra in a dream. Orestes reveals himself, prays at the tomb and enters the palace in disguise. He kills Aegisthus and then confronts his mother. Clytemnestra bares the breast that nursed him and asks whether he can kill his own mother. Orestes hesitates until Pylades speaks, then strikes. The play ends with the Erinyes, the ancient avengers of maternal blood, rising to pursue him.

The Eumenides follows Orestes to Delphi and then to Athens. Apollo has purified him but cannot end the pursuit. At the Areopagus, Athena establishes a jury of Athenian citizens. Apollo argues that the father is the true parent and that Orestes acted under divine command. The Erinyes defend the older law of blood for blood. The votes are equal, and Athena casts the deciding vote for acquittal. The Erinyes threaten to poison the land with sterility. Athena persuades them to accept a cult in Athens, transforming them from dreaded Erinyes into honoured Eumenides and Semnai Theai. The trilogy ends in procession, blessing the city with fertility, peace and victory without civil war.

Prometheus Bound occupies a different position. Ancient authorities attributed it to Aeschylus, and it entered the manuscript tradition under his name. Stylistic and metrical arguments, however, have led many scholars to doubt his authorship. Some have assigned it to his son Euphorion, who produced plays after Aeschylus's death. Others accept the traditional attribution but date it late. The honest record is therefore this: Prometheus Bound is a surviving play attributed to Aeschylus, not a securely authenticated Aeschylean tragedy.

Prometheus Bound dramatises the punishment of the Titan who stole fire and gave it to mortals. Might and Force chain him to a rock in Scythia while Hephaestus performs the binding. The daughters of Oceanus visit him; Oceanus urges submission; Io enters, tormented by Hera and pursued across the world. Prometheus reveals the future: Zeus will fall unless he marries a woman whose child is greater than its father. Hermes demands the secret, Prometheus defies him, and the play ends as the earth opens and he is hurled beneath the earth. The lost Prometheus Unbound showed Heracles freeing him. The lost Prometheus the Fire-Bearer apparently treated his return to Olympus. If the trilogy was Aeschylean, it presented rebellion, suffering and reconciliation on a cosmic scale.

Beyond the surviving plays, the ancient catalogue preserves around seventy or eighty titles, depending on how duplicates and variants are counted. The Life of Aeschylus gives seventy dramas plus twenty satyr plays. The Suda gives ninety dramas in all. The discrepancy probably reflects different methods of counting trilogies, satyr plays and plays of disputed attribution. Aeschylus's lost output cannot be reconstructed as a neat list of ninety works, but its major sequences are clear.

The Achilles trilogy consisted of Myrmidons, Nereids and Phrygians or The Ransoming of Hector. Myrmidons dramatised Achilles' withdrawal from battle and the death of Patroclus. Nereids presented the grief of Thetis and the sea nymphs. Phrygians apparently reached the ransom of Hector. The trilogy followed the Iliad while reshaping it for the stage. Aeschylus was remembered for making Achilles a figure of almost silent heroic anger.

The Danaid trilogy is represented by The Suppliants. The lost plays were The Egyptians, The Danaids and the satyr play Amymone. The sequence moved from the Danaids' flight to forced marriage, mass murder and the trial of Hypermnestra. The role of Aphrodite at the end, preserved in fragments, presented erotic union as a cosmic principle.

The Prometheus trilogy is represented by Prometheus Bound. Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bearer are lost, as is the related satyr material. The lost plays would have changed the ending from defiance to release. Heracles, Io's descendant, likely appeared as the archer who shot the eagle and freed the Titan.

The Lycurgeia treated the opposition between Dionysus and King Lycurgus of Thrace. The plays appear to have been The Edonians, The Bassarids or Bassarae and The Youths. Their lost myths included Lycurgus's resistance to the god, the death of Orpheus and Dionysiac retribution. The satyr play Lycurgus may have belonged to the sequence. Aeschylus's lost Bacchic dramas were important enough for Aristophanes' Euripides to claim that he filled his plays with Aeschylean nectar.

Other notable lost works include Niobe, in which the heroine sat silent in mourning after Apollo and Artemis killed her children; Ghost-Raisers, which influenced later accounts of Odysseus' consultation of the dead; The Weighing of Souls, in which Zeus weighed the fates of Achilles and Memnon; The Bone-Gatherers, a satyr play connected with Odysseus and the Cyclops; The Netfishers, a satyr play from the same myth; The Psychostasia; The Egyptians; The Danaids; Palamedes, which defended the wrongly condemned Greek intellectual; Philoctetes; The Wagon of Nauplius; The Carians or Europa; The Priestesses; The Women of Etna; The Women of Perrhaebia; The Thracian Women; The Harpalides; The Heliades; The Cretan Women; The Xantriai; The Cabiri; The Archeresses; and a host of plays whose titles survive without plot. Together they show how broad his mythological range was.

Aeschylus's satyr plays were famous in antiquity even though none survives complete. The Suda's higher count and the Life's division of seventy tragedies and twenty satyr plays show that his comic-mythological output was substantial. Amymone, The Sphinx, Proteus, The Bone-Gatherers and The Netfishers are among the known satyr titles. The Roman mosaic that shows Aeschylus directing a satyr play preserves the ancient memory that his theatre included the obscene, dancing and comic as well as the sublime.

His dramatic art joined poetry, religion and spectacle. Aeschylus used majestic compound adjectives, repeated images and chains of metaphor. Fire, nets, snakes, blood, storms, yokes, ships and towers recur as physical and moral symbols. His choruses dance and sing complex lyric passages that carry the emotional and religious weight of the plays. His stagecraft made use of impressive costumes, masks, chariots, silences, entrances, processions and mechanical revelation. The Eumenides reportedly terrified the audience with its chorus of snake-haired Furies. The theatre he created did not merely show events. It made divine power visible.

His thought is sometimes described as theological, but his gods are not simple moral instructors. Zeus governs a universe in which justice is real, yet its operation passes through suffering, inherited guilt and mysterious suffering. Human beings learn through pain, as the Agamemnon says. Excess invites punishment. The Persians' Xerxes yokes the sea and loses his fleet. Agamemnon walks on purple and enters the house of death. Orestes obeys Apollo and incurs the Erinyes. The city must create institutions capable of receiving violence without endlessly reproducing it. That is why the Oresteia ends not with another killing but with a court, persuasion and cult.

The Athenian democracy appears most clearly in The Suppliants and The Eumenides. Pelasgus puts the reception of the Danaids to the people. Athena gives Orestes a jury of citizens and casts her vote for mercy when the count is tied. The final procession joins gods, citizens and former avengers in a common order. These are not neutral descriptions of historical institutions, but they show tragedy imagining the city as a place where collective judgement can replace private vengeance.

Ancient reception began immediately. Aristophanes parodied his language and celebrated his martial spirit. Plato quotes his Niobe and criticises his theology. Aristotle made him the technical founder of dramatic dialogue. Later critics praised his sublimity. Horace remembered him as the poet who brought tragedy down from the mountains with huge sounds and magnificent robes. Seneca, Plutarch, Lucian and the Greek sophists all show that his work remained a standard of poetic power.

After his death, the Athenians honoured Aeschylus with an unusual privilege. Anyone wishing to restage one of his plays could receive a chorus at public expense. This official revival right reflects his status as a classic during the lifetimes of Sophocles and Euripides. The Athenian state later required authoritative texts of the classic tragedians, and the Alexandrian scholars produced an edition of seven Aeschylean plays with commentary. The choice of seven shaped transmission.

The medieval survival was narrow. The Byzantine triad consisted of Prometheus, Seven Against Thebes and The Persians, sometimes with Agamemnon and Eumenides added later. The most important manuscript, the tenth-century Medicean or Laurentian codex, contains all seven surviving plays together with the works of Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius. It reached Florence in 1423 and became the foundation of the modern text. The Aldine Press printed Aeschylus in 1518. Renaissance Europe encountered a poet whose music had vanished but whose language still sounded like thunder.

Modern Aeschylean scholarship has recovered fragments from quotations, lexica and Egyptian papyri, reconstructing lost trilogies and correcting the inherited text. Scholars still debate the authorship of Prometheus Bound, the ending of Seven Against Thebes, the date and structure of The Suppliants and the exact staging of the Oresteia. The plays have been translated by Gilbert Murray, Richmond Lattimore, Tony Harrison, Anne Carson, Emily Wilson and many others. Productions continue to stage The Persians as a play about empire, the Oresteia as a drama of justice and Prometheus Bound as a tragedy of rebellion.

The most accurate summary of Aeschylus's works is therefore both concise and cautious. Six tragedies survive complete and securely attributed: The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. Prometheus Bound survives under his name but with disputed authorship. The Oresteia is the only complete surviving ancient trilogy. The satyr plays are entirely lost. The titles and fragments of many other tragedies, trilogies and satyr plays survive, but the ancient totals of seventy to ninety plays cannot be reconstructed work by work. Aeschylus's secure achievement is smaller than his ancient reputation and larger than any modern list can fully recover.