Elements in the Tragedies of Aeschylus:
Politics, Peripateia, and Morality
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Politics in the Tragedy of Aeschylus
The Great Dionysia was a political as well as religious event and the Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides), by Aeschylus, first performed in 458, with their "repeated references to Argos (the chorus in Agamemnon was composed of the elders of Argos), civil war, war in general, and the Areopagus Council," were political, according to "Chapter Alpha: Backgrounds Political, Theatrical, Social, Mythical," http://web.reed.edu/academic/departments/classics/HarveyThesis/ch1.html, 1997.
Keith Sidwell, in "The politics of Aeschylus' Eumenides" (http://www.ucd.ie/~classics/96/Sidwell96.html), isn't so sure. He describes the interconnection between the archaic world of myth and legend that provides the subject matter of the drama and the political realities of the 5th century B.C. audience:
"The institutions and language of the polis often intrude upon and articulate these pre-polis stories. But there is a more serious problem. Occasionally, issues and events which clearly belong in the world of the audience are highlighted so strongly that it is hard not to feel that there is some political axe being ground. Yet because they are only occasional and are embedded in mythical material, it is also difficult to argue unequivocally for a political interpretation."
Morality in the Tragedy of Aeschylus
Peripateia
In his book on Thucydides, (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Thucydides/Cornford/CTOC.html) Thucydides Mythistoricus, Conford argues that the essence of tragedy is (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Thucydides/Cornford/CCh.8.html#139.1) Peripateia, a sudden reversal of fortune:
"[O]verthrow caused by an external supernatural agency -- Fate or an angry god. When the belief in such agencies fades, `reversal' remains as a feature in drama; but the change of situation is now caused by the hero's own act."
Cornford believes the very drama of Aeschylus went through this change from the mythic to the human.
Chorus and the Divine Order in Tragedy
In what Cornford believes is the earliest play by Aeschylus, The Suppliants, the chorus and the heroines are the same. In the later plays by Aeschylus, the two elements are separate, but equally important. The two parts maintain an important distinction: the chorus represents a timeless, other worldly, divine or universal element while the actors play individual, time-bound humans.
Chorus and the Military
In a similar vein, Dr. Jonathan Shay, MD, writes in (http://didaskalia.open.ac.uk/issues/vol2no2/Shay.html)" The Birth of Tragedy - Out of the Needs of Democracy," that the City Dionysia was organized into military units; that soldiers, already trained to work as a unit, formed the choruses; and that this soldier chorus stood for moral order.
"[T]he same young soldiers who had recently done close-order drill in the theater made up the chorus for the tragedies. (6) I find this significant because of the social and ethical positions that the chorus frequently took in Athenian tragedy. The chorus was the voice of nomos (social morality, convention, 'what's right') in the play -- most vividly perhaps in Aeschylus' plays. Unlike the principal actors who portray the powerful, the chorus represented the powerless: 'slave women, prisoners of war, old men -- who will certainly be implicated in the effects of unwise, headstrong, or ignorant action on the part of the principals.' (7)"
Tragedy and Monotheism
In (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScience/Students/Jin/Gods2.html) "The Creation and Destruction of God, The Critique," Jin Chung argues that Aeschylus is adapting new scientific thinking to the old myths. The important roles are played by the actors. Furthermore, monotheistic supremacy is ascribed to Zeus even in matters that might formerly have been considered Athena's provenance, like wisdom.
