Soldier of Marathon: A Novel of Aeschylus

Aeschylus is the twentieth life in the Ancient Civilisations series. His epitaph, which he wrote himself, mentions Marathon. It does not mention his plays. He thought that mattered more.

He invented the second actor, the single innovation that made dramatic conflict possible on the Greek stage, and with it, Western theatre as we know it. He wrote perhaps ninety plays, of which seven survive. He won the Dionysia more times than any playwright in Athenian history. And when he wrote his own epitaph, he mentioned none of it. He mentioned that he had fought at Marathon.

Aeschylus grew up at Eleusis, in the shadow of the most sacred mystery rite in the Greek world, and came of age as Athenian democracy itself was being invented across the bay. He fought the Persians at Marathon, where his brother died trying to seize an enemy ship, and he watched the Persian fleet break apart at Salamis from close enough to write about it with the precision of a witness. Out of this (the war, the new democracy, and the unspeakable things he had grown up beside at Eleusis) he built a body of work that gave tragedy its formal shape: the trilogy, the layered language, and finally the Oresteia, a three-play sequence about whether a cycle of vengeance can ever be broken, staged in 458 BC while Athens was asking the same question of its own newly reformed courts.

This novel follows Aeschylus from Eleusis to the killing fields of Marathon, through fifteen years of losing at the Dionysia before his first victory, to the Oresteia's furies, said to have caused audience members to faint, and to his death in Sicily, struck (according to legend) by a tortoise dropped by an eagle that mistook his bald head for a stone. It takes seriously a man who believed that what he had done for Athens as a soldier mattered more than what he had done for it as the father of tragedy, and asks what that choice tells us about both.

A vivid, theologically serious reconstruction of the playwright who gave the Western stage its voice, and chose to be remembered, first, as a citizen.

The Soldier of Marathon is the twentieth novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.