from the Ecclesia to prepare and propose the laws. The Ecclesia also elected the magistrates who ran the legal system and the military, as well as a large pool of jurors to serve at trials. The entire enterprise was based on the novel premise of isonomia, the equality of all citizens before the law.
Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution 3.17; see also Peter J. Brand, “Athens and Sparta: Democracy vs. Dictatorship,” Ancient World Online, available via https://umdrive.memphis.edu/pbrand/public/.
The result was the unprecedented participation of Athenians in their government, which became known as demokratia – rule by the demos, the free citizens in assembly. Over the centuries, critics have maintained that Athens was not a true democracy because slavery still existed and women were excluded from participating, as were those unable or unwilling to serve in the military. Even so, what was practiced in Athens became the paradigm of democracy in the West, the model that all future free systems would reference in some way. Cleisthenes’ reforms, moreover, ushered in a dazzling burst of creative excellence, producing seminal achievements in art, drama and philosophy. The tragedies that Aeschylus was presenting at the Theater of Dionysus were a part of this broader cultural ferment.
The playwright kicked at the wooden theater benches. “Not so many years ago,” he said, “we didn’t have seats at all. We sat on the ground and that was good enough for us. Now everything is fancy.”
“It can’t be too fancy for me,” Pericles replied. “I want to do your plays justice! They are noble things; the dignity of Darius is particularly impressive. But with all their wisdom and majesty, the Persians never understood that the root of their failure was to attack Athena’s city in the first place.”
“You may be an Athenian, but you should be careful assuming that you know what the gods are about, Pericles. Especially since your family . . . ” Aeschylus’s voice trailed off.
“Yes. The Alcmænidæ were once under a curse. I know that is what you were hinting at.”
“They murdered their enemies in Athena’s temple. No matter what the reason, that is an unforgivable sacrilege, like a child killing his parent.”
“But what if the parent committed a worse crime? Circumstances always matter. And our curse was lifted, so what my ancestors did couldn’t have been so very bad.” Pericles looked up at the ruins on the Acropolis. “Maybe one day I can wipe that slate completely clean.”
“What do you think Athena would say?” Aeschylus asked. “She would want her people to avoid these crimes and honor each other as they honor her. That’s more important than any passing political glory.”66
This sentiment is expressed by the goddess herself when she appears in the final act of Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the third in his trio of plays about the curse on the house of Agamemnon.
Pericles drew the playwright’s attention to the beautiful singing voice of the boy who was playing the part of Atossa, the Persian queen mother. But he could not help noting to himself that pericles literally meant “surrounded by glory.”
When The Persians made its formal debut the following day, Atossa came onto the stage consumed with worry. The expedition led by her son Xerxes against the Greeks should have been an all-but-certain victory, for he took with him the cream of the military force of the mightiest empire on earth. But Atossa received the shocking news that the Persian fleet had been devastated by the Greeks at Salamis.
The queen went to the tomb of her husband, Darius, who had been defeated by the Greeks in the first Persian invasion. His ghost appeared and told her that Xerxes had brought this calamity upon himself by building an enormous pontoon bridge across the Hellespont, thus uniting Europe and Asia.77 At some 1,350 yards wide, the bridge allowed Xerxes to move his immense army quickly from Persia into Greece; but it was an affront to the gods, who punished him for it.
Herodotus, The Histories 7.34–36.
Xerxes himself then appeared and walked to the center of the stage, with members of the chorus standing around him. He wore a rich, exotic robe, but it was dirty and torn, revealing wounds painted on in bright red, and his mask depicted an agonized scowl. He still could not comprehend the reason for his own suffering. The audience sat spellbound as the Persian king bemoaned his lot:
Ah me, how sudden have the storms of Fate,
Beyond all thought, all apprehension, burst
On my devoted head! O Fortune, Fortune!
With what relentless fury hath thy hand
Hurl’d desolation on the Persian race!
Wo unsupportable! The torturing thought
Of our lost youth comes rushing on my mind,
And sinks me to the ground. O Jove, that I
Had died with those brave men that died in fight!
The chorus asked the king over and over about the fate of the Persian heroes, with their flaming crowns and purple spears. They were all, Xerxes reported, “in the earth entomb’d.” The chorus then lamented how the god of war had beaten down the Persian force:
Again the voice of wild despair
With thrilling shrieks shall pierce the air;
For high the god of war his flaming crest
Raised, with the fleet of Greece surrounded,
The haughty arms of Greece with conquest bless’d,
And Persia’s wither’d force confounded,
Dash’d on the dreary beach her heroes slain,
Or whelm’d them in the darken’d main.88
Aeschylus, The Persians, trans. Robert Potter, available at http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/persians.html.
After the play concluded with Xerxes and the chorus expressing their grief, the audience was silent for a while and then broke into thunderous applause. The decisive Battle of Salamis was only eight years in the past, and many of the audience members were veterans of the Persian Wars, including Aeschylus himself.
What Aeschylus left out of his drama is that the Persians might never have bothered to invade in the first place if the Greeks had not provoked them. Some Greek colonies in Ionia, on the Aegean coast of modern Turkey, had rebelled against the empire around 500 BC. Greeks from Athens and Eretria went to assist them, eventually sacking the city of Sardis.99 In response, the emperor Darius I organized a force of twenty thousand men, which advanced all the way to Marathon, just a little north of Athens. It was so close that an Athenian courier sent back to announce the Greek victory was able to run the 26.1 miles to Athens without stopping.1010
Herodotus, The Histories 5.97–105.
In his account of the Battle of Marathon, Herodotus mentions a courier going to Sparta and Athens, but not this fabled run, which first appears in Plutarch. Herodotus, The Histories 6.105; and Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium 3 (available at the Perseus Digital Library).
The pioneering Greek historian Herodotus reports that the Persians lost 6,400 men at Marathon – more than a quarter of the force – while the Greeks lost only 192.1111 The defeat was so lopsided that Darius’s son Xerxes vowed to return and destroy the Greeks as a sacred duty:
Herodotus, The Histories 6.102–18.
I intend to bridge the Hellespont and lead an army through Europe to Greece, so that we can punish the Athenians for all that they did to the Persians and to my father. Now you saw how even Darius had his mind set on marching against these men, but