In this seventh addition to the Looking at … series, David Stuttard has assembled an international cast of experts to provide an up-to-date assessment of Aeschylus’ Persians, an ‘historical’ (though Stuttard prefers the term ‘contemporary’) drama first performed in Athens in 472 BCE. Essays in the volume cover a range of themes and approaches, such as the theatrical context of the play (‘Persians on Stage’, Paul Cartledge), Aeschylus’ evocation of epic models (‘Homeric Echoes on the Battlefield of Persians’, Laura Swift) and the characterization of the Queen Mother (‘Atossa’, Hanna M. Roisman). As is usual for the series, Stuttard also includes a fresh translation of the play; as with the volume’s other contributions, the translation was produced during the COVID pandemic, and is therefore the only one in the series not to have been performed at the time of publication (vii).
The book begins with a concise introduction (Stuttard) that explores the other plays in Aeschylus’ tetralogy of 472 BCE, Persians’ complex portrayal of the Persian ‘other’ and the play’s original staging, as well as its reperformance in both fifth-century Greece and the modern world. In the first chapter proper, Cartledge situates the play against its historical backdrop; the discussion focuses on Aeschylus’ predecessor, Phrynichus of Miletus (whose play Capture of Miletus had fared so badly in Athens, Hdt. 6.21.2) and the anti-Persian sentiment widespread in Greece (and particularly Athens) in the decades that followed the battles of 480–479. The essay closes with an interesting coda that underscores how modern translations and performances of the play are far from politically neutral. Next, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones scrutinizes the manifold discrepancies between Achaemenid Persia and Persia in the Greek imagination. According to Llewellyn-Jones, Aeschylus displays only a partial understanding of Persian geography, history, language and customs, and even less understanding of Achaemenid queens. It is not, however, altogether clear from this reading how best to construe Aeschylus’ rather sympathetic portrait of the Queen Mother (presumably Atossa, though she is never named in the play), a contrast with other Greek accounts of haughty Persian royal women.
In his essay on the first production of Persians in 472, Robert Garland attempts to excavate the audience’s response to Aeschylus’ drama as it progresses (like other contributors, Garland supposes that tragic audiences in the 470s were exclusively male). Given the many imponderables concerning Persians’ original staging, from the scenery used to its musical accompaniments, Garland is repeatedly forced to argue from the likelihood that the Athenian spectators reacted in a triumphalist, patriotic mood, albeit mindful of the Persians’ humanity. And while much remains unclear about the original performance of Persians, Carmel McCallum Barry’s chapter focuses on Aeschylus’ striking use of visual language, facilitating audiences’ apprehension of imperial Persia. Like Garland, Sophie Mills also attends to the play’s political outlook: Mills looks to show how ‘Persians is deeply marked by … early stirrings of imperial possibilities’ (68), not least by eliding Athenian and Greek identities (and also Athenian and Ionian), but also by promoting Athens as a virtuous place of exceptional character. Readers of Herodotus, however, may not share Mills’s belief that he, like Aeschylus, presents Athens in an entirely positive light; altogether ‘darker’ readings have multiplied in the years since Charles W. Fornara’s Herodotus: An Interpretive Essay (Oxford 1971).
In the following chapter, Swift switches the focus towards Persians’ literary qualities. She explores not only points of contact with the Homeric poems, but also ways in which Persians diverges from epic precedents, for example in the way it reconfigures political hierarchies on account of Athens’ fledgling democracy. In one of the book’s most insightful contributions, Michael Carroll, too, concentrates on the literary merits of the play in his analysis of the interdependent tragedies of Persia and Xerxes; Carroll persuasively argues that the parodos’ emphasis on the vast scale of Persian and Xerxean power is then sustained over the course of the drama, which underscores Xerxes’ and Persia’s great defeat. The scale of Persia’s downfall is also a focal point of Rush Rehm’s chapter on nature in Persians, which demonstrates how land, sea and celestial forces combine to resist Persia’s imperial annexation of Greece. For Rehm, Persians’ discourse on the cosmos continues to resonate with contemporary audiences, blighted by global warming and the climate crisis.
In Alan Sommerstein’s contribution, Persians is not a drama about Greek victory but rather about Persian defeat: even if early audiences basked in the Greeks’ victory, they were surely capable of empathizing with the humanized Persians (parents, wives, children) and their baleful lamentations for the dead. Such a shaded appreciation of the Persians’ characterization similarly underlies Hanna M. Roisman’s essay on Atossa, who is not entirely an index for Athenian stereotypes of Persian women; the Queen Mother also elicits sympathy and understanding. And just as the audience meet Xerxes’ mother, so too they meet (the ghost of) his deceased father, Darius, the subject of Anna Uhlig’s essay on the metadramatic potential of spectral presences in Aeschylean theatre.
The final essay, by Mike Pearson, offers a thorough analysis of National Theatre Wales’ 2010 site-specific production of Persians. Pearson illustrates how this unique production stimulated audiences ‘to rethink the contracts of theatre: spatial, scenic, rhetorical’ (179).
Unfortunately, space does not permit an extended review of Stuttard’s reliable translation, but it will surely prove a useful resource for students as well as theatre practitioners.
To conclude, Looking at Persians will likely appeal most of all to those encountering Aeschylus’ play for the first time. Even so, readers more familiar with the text may well profit from the ideas in several essays.
