Aeschylus II

Rapid-fire posting! I expected to be the only one to post today, but Marissa has already written a blog post as well, with the promise of more to come. After finishing up Cat's Cradle today, I jumped straight into the second Aeschylus collection. For those who don't know, Aeschylus is most famous for his Oresteia Trilogy, which details the homecoming of Agamemnon from the Trojan war. I read through that collection (Aeschylus I) back in college, but never got around to Aeschylus II until now. The collection contains four unrelated plays, all of which are thought to be part of their own separate trilogies. Unfortunately the other plays have been lost, meaning that aside from a commentary from the translator, I have little to go on in terms of context. At least there were a few characters I knew somewhat, and the plays were short enough that it was never a big inconvenience to read. The first play is The Suppliant Maidens, probably the most interesting of the four, which seems to be a transition between two plays- a group of women have fled from Libya to Greece in order to avoid having to marry their cousins, leading the local king to struggle with a moral dilemma- take the women in, as the gods would expect, or send them on their way and not have to worry about being attacked by said cousins. The second play, The Persians, features Paolo from Lost (I mean Xerxes) returning to Persia to talk with his mother and dead father after a particularly heartbreaking defeat. Seven Against Thebes was nearly as boring- Eteocles, son of Oedipus (yeah that Oedipus) and six of his friends defend their city from his brother and a group of attackers. Too bad all of the action took place off-stage. The fourth play at least let the collection end on a strong note- Prometheus Bound sees mankind-saver Prometheus, chained to a cliff, plotting with the titans to bring down Zeus and all of the gods who have wronged him. Prometheus had some pretty awesome monologues, and I would have liked to see where the trilogy went from there. Oh well. This series of four tragedies was hit-or-miss, but overall I think I enjoyed some of my least favorite comedic plays more than the best ones here. I wouldn't recommend tackling this one, even if you were interested in ancient literature. Just go reread one of the heavy hitters instead, you'll have a much better time.