#37 AESCHYLUS (c525 BC – 455 BC): A GREEK TRAGIC
Agamemnon begins with the flare of beacons that flash along the headlands of Greece and signal to Clytemnestra and to the men too old to go to war, that Troy has fallen and her husband, the king, is on his way home. Agamemnon, the commander in chief of the Greek coalition, returns with his booty, Cassandra, the wailing daughter of King Priam of Troy, to a magnificent red carpet reception. The king may be uneasy but his captives are full of foreboding. They have scarcely gone inside the palace doors when we hear the death screams of the king. The doors suddenly open and Clytemnestra stands over their bodies, blood dripping from her knife and boasts of her crime to the old men of the chorus.
Here is Aeschylus at work! With swift and terrible action and soaring poetry he demonstrates Clytemnestra’s retaliation for her husband’s brutal sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia to ensure his safe passage to Troy. Aeschylus shows how evil breeds evil and how each character must accept the moral responsibility for their actions. The Agamemnon is the first play of the magnificent trilogy of the Oresteia.
Aeschylus, a contemporary of Sophocles and Euripides, is credited with inventing Greek tragedy. He transformed the choral poetry and the dance of the plays which celebrated the festivals of Demeter, the goddess of grain and the High Priestess aspect of Mary. He transformed the celebration of Dionysius, the god of wine and an aspect of St Germain, from a stately but static oratorio between the chorus and one character into a dynamic interaction among two or more characters. In doing so, he created dialogue and increased the dramatic tension of his plays. He reduced the size of the chorus and he introduced spectacular stage machinery, scenic effects and designed costumes. Aristophanes says that Aeschylus “first decked out tragedy with magnificence”.
Born in 525BC in Eleusis, a district of Athens which was the centre of the worship of Demeter and the hub of the Eleusian mysteries we know from a variety of sources that Aeschylus started his career as a playwright in 498BC. But the earliest of the six plays we have is 490BC, the year he fought in the battle of Marathon. Ten years later he would again fight the Persians, this time against Darius I, at Salamis and write a play of recent history about the Greek’s struggle against Xerxes. This play The Persians, the second of the dramas we have, is only one of the perhaps ninety plays he wrote.
According to contemporary writers, Aeschylus was accused of impiety and tried before the court of Areopagus. It was alleged that in one of his plays he revealed the Eleusinian mysteries and he was attacked on the stage by an enraged audience. He saved himself by hiding behind the altar of Dionysus.
Aeschylus is an aspect of St Germain from his trickster line of Jacob.
Conversation with the Gatekeeper
“The only vital statistics we have on Aeschylus come as a result of what was written on his tombstone which said he was born in Eleusis, a special part of Athens.”
“Aeschylus was born in the special religious site which was also the home of Dionysius and Demeter where their mysteries started. This was the source of trouble for him.”
“Are you referring to the tradition that Aeschylus was accused of impiety before the court of Areopagus for revealing Eleusian mysteries? So there’s truth in this?”
“Aeschylus wrote a sexual farce which depicted the initiation of a young boy into the Eleusian mysteries. It was greatly irreverent. He got into serious trouble for revealing the secrets of the Dionysian rites to the uninitiated and was accused of impiety for parodying the sacred mysteries. He was cleared of the second charge but convicted of the first. The Areopagus was a civil court where he could have lost his citizenship. As it was, he had to pay a large fine to the Temple of Dionysus and he was severely reprimanded!”
“What exactly does a charge of impiety mean?”
“It means… oh, it is not a pretty picture! I am looking at it now. Aeschylus at his own home was in a drunken orgiastic bout where he parodies the sacred rites by enacting a form of sexual intercourse with male and female partners before the uninitiated. It is a sex orgy with music, drama, alcohol and the hallucinogenic drugs like those used in the Dionysian ritual, but primarily with hashish. Some of the music is beautiful, some very sordid. Prostitutes, who had been kept unwashed and drugged around the Temple were exploited in his parody. He was capable of extraordinary excesses particularly when drunk but he was never so unwise in his excesses again.”
“What exactly are the Eleusian mysteries?”
“I’ll answer that as best as I can because part of the information is veiled. They were religious rites executed around sex and hallucinogenic drugs like hashish and agaric. They were a rite of passage, of heightened sexual excitement where boys lost their virginity in a multi gender way. There was a great deal of secrecy around them because of the fear and the intense pleasure.”
“Sounds like the Sixties. Were they the same as the Dionysian rites?”
“The Dionysian rites had more drunkenness and sacred prostitution. These were women who had been abandoned as girls, escaped slaves, or children sold as prostitutes by poor families because it was more profitable than the exposure of them as babies on the hillside. These women were hidden in the Dionysian groves and bound to have sex with anyone who demanded it.”
“Let’s talk about something more mundane. How was he educated?”
“Aeschylus was educated by an Athenian private tutor, a freeman. There were also slaves who tutored him, encouraging him to be quite learned and well versed in Homer. He would spend his lifetime jealous of the artistic achievement of others. One of his tutors was a Pythagorean whose philosophy was heresy to the Greeks. They would not separate and label their religion and philosophy as you do. He won his first laurel for drama at age eighteen.”
“His tomb also acknowledges he fought at Marathon as a soldier and he appears to be very proud of his role, but it doesn’t mention his role as a dramatist. He must have excelled in military service?”
“Aeschylus was very brave at Marathon and commended by the commander. All the Greeks had to do national service and he was a hoplite, a spear-carrier, as was Socrates later on. While he was brave, Aeschylus did not have the self-discipline to be a good soldier; he was undisciplined like Homer and wished only for the good opinion of his comrades. Because his satires brought him into disrepute, his occupation as a dramatist wasn’t mentioned in his gravestone.”
“Can you see him? What does he look like?”
“He was short, about five feet, stocky with a dark complexion, sallow skin and a large beaky nose; he would tend to obesity in later life. Yet, when he was young he had a solid build - more like Homer physically. His plain, even homely appearance was not helped by his tendency to baldness. He was bald by thirty. He was really fairly unremarkable, not tall enough to be intimidating and not handsome enough to be admirable. By nature he was prone to sulking when thwarted. He went into a massive sulk when Sophocles beat him.”
“Did he marry? There is a tradition which says he had two sons: one son called Ion who maybe wrote Prometheus Bound and another Euphorion who defeated Sophocles and Euripides in 431 in the Prize of Dionysia?”
“Officially he didn’t marry although he had a few common law marriages or a series of live-in lovers, some of whom were slaves. He fathered two sons and two daughters but only his sons were dramatists.’”
“We know him to have written between seventy and ninety plays of which we have six. Is this about right? Of the remaining but missing sixty four plays, are they still in existence and if so, will we find them?”
“He wrote about seventy plays and part of the cache will be found in America from the Alexandrine library. They will be his lost works and in sufficiently good condition.”
“Do we have his best work?”
“There are other examples which stand comparison with his best work, some truly remarkable writing. There is this unknown masterpiece called ‘The Blessed One’.”
“Do you mean ‘The Furies’?”
“You couldn’t name them; to name them was to call them. They would strip and shred a man’s soul if he was guilty of hubris.”
“What is it about?”
“A man falls asleep in a sacred grove and wakes with an asses head instead of his own.”
“That happens to Bottom in A Midsummer’s Nights’ Dream.”
“The playwright was told about the play by scholars who’d seen a fragment of it. The Blessed One is not a comedic dream; it is a nightmare… everybody’s worst nightmare of unutterable despair and torment.”
“We credit Aeschylus with inventing this form of drama… the tragedy. Should we?”
“Aeschylus did not really invent tragedy; he formalized it, disciplined it and gave it structure.”
“Is there any truth in the story that Aeschylus had a dream in which Dionysus appeared to him and encouraged him to write drama?”
“So Aeschylus claims and it is very possible that when he was under the influence of hashish he saw Dionysus. It was after all St Germain’s ritual and his aspect Aeschylus was convinced of its truth.”
“His work has a strong moral and religious emphasis. Given what you’ve described of his life it is hard to reconcile strong morality with his behaviour. How was his moral sensibility developed?”
“In a man addicted to such excesses and given to dark clouds of depression about the shortcomings of his own character, it is a good question. He was not as alcohol dependent as Homer; he was a binge drinker and could survive with no alcohol for long periods. As a reaction to the baseness of his character, he flagellated himself. His conflict was expressed as a deeply pious man who warred with his excesses as a sensuous libertine. Like most artists he had little control over his conflicts.”
“Why did he spend so much time at the Court of Hieron of Syracuse?”
“Hieron was a great patron of his. Whenever he visited Syracuse, Aeschylus was the court bard who entertained the King. When he experienced a certain degree of vicissitudes in Athens he would go to Syracuse to live up royally. He was multi-talented but with little commonsense. He’d go flying after something like a jumping bean then wallow in remorse, and because he had no boundaries, he offended many people.”
“Legend says that Aeschylus was killed in Syracuse when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head thinking his head was a stone. There’s got to be another story. What is it?”
“While the legend is not completely true but there is some truth in it. Aeschylus was drunk and playing a game of mock bandits with his friends when he was hit on the top of his head with a cudgel. He had, it turned out, a very thin skull and the story was invented to save his poor unfortunate playmate, beside himself with shame and grief, from being charged with homicide.”
“Why did St Germain select this life?”
“I can only surmise so I am asking him to enlighten me. The Count says he wanted to experience artistic licence without any restraint to see the difference between artistry with no boundaries in contrast to a life with all the artistic, moral and cultural restraints which he would to experience many times later.”
“What qualities of St Germain did he bring into his life as Aeschylus?”
“He brought his intellect, artistry and a love of expression of defining reality in words with his characteristic irreverence. If God is worth worshipping, he believed, he is also worth the impudent gesture of his third finger thrust. He was a satirist and we’ll see that in his future lives as Dante, Swift and Pope. It is this Germanic quality of a love of shocking people, together with his impatience with people’s solemnity. Aeschylus was very good at this.”
“What was his life’s purpose?”
“It was to discover the secret of harnessing creativity. Shall we look at Vincent Van Gogh’s life for a moment? Early on, he had rude and crude behaviour, which lends to bad art. When he learnt some restraint, good art like ‘Crows in the Corn Field’ with its disciplined brushwork flowed. Aeschylus would eventually harness his creativity effectively.”
“What was his spiritual challenge?”
“His greatest spiritual challenge was to reconcile his warring parts; the conflict in his character between the libertine and the pious and he failed at this.”
“And his greatest accomplishment?”
“His body of work, especially the Oresteia. Although in his lost work there is its equal in The Blessed Ones.”
“What literacy and philosophical development do you see from Homer to Aeschylus?”
“There is the literary development from the sagas of the Iliad and Odyssey which relate heroic deeds in a musical ballad form to the changing structure of the drama as it becomes more life-like. Aeschylus forces that change, hurrying the evolution of theatre out of the balladeers. Philosophically Aeschylus, unlike Homer, questions the gods. He is a sceptic and here is the first to use the gods in a deux ex machina… there is no solemn reverence here… his gods were largely concerned with their own amusement.”
“I’d like to return to a previous question where I haven’t grasped your reply. I asked how Aeschylus developed his fine moral sensibility with such licentious behaviour.”
“I’ll put it more simply. His deep religious sense triumphed over his more basic instincts. This didn’t occur because of enlightenment. No. His alcoholism caused his sexual impotency allowing him to become more morally religious and his great works came from that period when his sexual licentiousness was calmed.”
“It will be interesting to see where he goes next in creative exploration.”
“Into the arms of the medieval Catholic Church as Dante. He’ll have other lives of course but we can’t cover them all. His lives would fill your book.”
“It wouldn’t be dull!”
“Plato’s next. What more could you ask for? Isn’t he your hero? Well, let’s see if he’s still your hero after I’ve finished with him.”
