ABSTRACT
We are very grateful indeed to have Lieutenant Colonel Kristen Janowsky with us today, who served for almost thirty years in the US Army, and we are indebted to her for the time she has taken to think about Aeschylus and especially about his Seven against Thebes. Before we discuss the Seven against Thebes, though, I wanted to ask a more general question, if I may, which is something that has divided scholars of Greek tragedy about Aeschylus’ war play The Persians. The play is about a historical naval battle, the Battle of Salamis, which is won by the Greeks, but the tragedy is described from the perspective of the defeated Persians. The Persian king Xerxes comes home in tatters. He explains how most of his men have died, either in the naval battle or on the way home through hunger and disease. The ghost of his father is raised from the dead during the play. That man Darius is the man against whose forces Aeschylus had fought in 490 bce at the Battle of Marathon. The naval battle that is dramatized in the play took place in 480 bce, and the production of the play was eight years later in 472 bce. Scholars disagree about the purpose of this play. Some argue that it was written as a kind of triumphant victory celebration by Aeschylus about the victory over the defeated enemy, so that everyone could rally together and celebrate the defeat of the Persians, and one piece of evidence given in support of this is that the Greeks are described as singing a triumphant victory hymn as they go into battle (e.g. Hall 1996, Harrison 2000). The other scholarly argument is that this is a tragedy in which the Athenians, the Greeks, were meant to identify with the suffering of the tragic character and to consider the destructive nature of war in a general sense (e.g. Pelling 1997, Garvie 2009).
