AEschylus

AEschylus, the earliest and greatest of Greek tragedians, was born in 525 B.C. He took part in the defeat of the Persians both at Marathon and Salamis, and his play entitled the Persae is a glorious monument of this momentous struggle. He wrote seventy tragic dramas, all highly successful, of which only seven have come down to us. It would seem that he was opposed to the democratic principles of the Periclean era, and retired to Sicily, dying at Gela in his sixty-ninth year. Some attribute his expatriation to jealousy of Sophocles, who carried off the prize for tragedy in 468 B.C. His style, though obscure and sometimes harsh, possesses a stern, majestic eloquence to which no other Greek dramatist can pretend, and he was evidently inspired with a deep religious feeling and a sense of the highest duties of a national poet.