The magnificence of Aeschylus’s patriotic Persians is appropriate to the enormity of the events that took place during his lifetime. Such was the case with all his plays. He was a pioneering innovator who had effected a crucial transformation in the genre; his ancient biography records that he was the first tragedian “to make tragedy grander by means of nobler emotions. He decked out the stage and stunned his audience with brilliant visual effects, with paintings and machines, with stage props such as altars and tombs, with trumpets, ghosts, and Furies.”
