ABSTRACT
Although the Persae is, of course, the only extant tragedy whose plot is concerned with contemporary events, r there are elements that make 'history play' a misleading term to apply. 2 1t is, like most other tragedies, set in and largely concerned with a place that is not Athens,
t Originally published in Journal of Hellenic Studies ro8 (r988), 128-93. ' We know little of Phrynichus' Sack of Miletus, or of his Phoenissae, on which the
and it involves characters who are other than Athenian citizensfemales, barbarians, kings etc. 3 The narrative, moreover, as various critics have pointed out, is specifically 'theological', that is, the events of the recent past are seen in terms of divine causation, a divine punishment. 4 The Persians provide for the Athenian audience an exemplum, so critics have argued, of the need to avoid hubris. As often in Athenian culture, the East constitutes a privileged locus of what is different from Athenian society/ which is used to articulate concerns and positive values about the Athenians' own selves-the logic of the negative exemplum. The extensive kommos [lament] for such a defeated enemy is less easy to fit into such a description of the play, however, and critics have been led to describe it as 'satire' or even Schadenfreude [malicious joy].6 The sympathy-not to mention 'pity' and 'fear'-that one would normally associate with mourning might be seen rather as part of Aeschylus' turning the narrative away from a simple extolling of Athens' victory over the Persians towards the wider concerns of the theological or moral drama. It is not so much the fact of triumph as the factors that have led to triumph that interest Aeschylus.
