* 458 BC: Greek playwright Aeschylus completes the Oresteia, a trilogy that tells the story of a family blood feud.

In The Eumenides of Aeschylus ( 458 BC ), the Areopagus is the site of the trial of Orestes for killing his mother ( Clytemnestra ) and her lover ( Aegisthus ).

* Orestes in Aeschylus ' Oresteia ( 458 BC ).

The earliest known reference to the idea that swans sing one beautiful song before dying first appears in Aeschylus ' Agamemnon from 458 BC.

The first is the Libation Bearers in the Oresteia Trilogy by Aeschylus ( 458 BC ).

The enduring popularity of Aeschylus ' Oresteia trilogy ( produced in 458 BC ) is evident in Euripides ' construction of the recognition scene between Orestes and Electra.

Another piece of evidence used to support an early date is the relationship between the character of Deianeira and that of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus ' Oresteia, first produced in 458.

The earliest known reference to walking a red carpet in literature is in the play Agamemnon by Aeschylus, written in 458 BC.

Aeschylus (, Aiskhulos ; c. 525 / 524 BC – c. 456 / 455 BC ) was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays can still be read or performed, the others being Sophocles and Euripides.

So important was the war to Aeschylus and the Greeks that, upon his death, around 456 BC, his epitaph commemorated his participation in the Greek victory at Marathon rather than his success as a playwright.

As soon as he woke from the dream, the young Aeschylus began writing a tragedy, and his first performance took place in 499 BC, when he was only 26 years old ; He would win his first victory at the City Dionysia in 484 BC.

In 510 BC, Cleomenes I ( Aeschylus was 15 at the time ) expelled the sons of Peisistratus from Athens, and Cleisthenes came to power.

In 490 BC, Aeschylus and his brother Cynegeirus fought to defend Athens against Darius I's invading Persian army at the Battle of Marathon.

Aeschylus travelled to Sicily once or twice in the 470s BC, having been invited by Hiero I of Syracuse, a major Greek city on the eastern side of the island ; and during one of these trips he produced The Women of Aetna ( in honor of the city founded by Hieron ) and restaged his Persians.

By 473 BC, after the death of Phrynichus, one of his chief rivals, Aeschylus was the yearly favorite in the Dionysia, winning first prize in nearly every competition.

In 472 BC, Aeschylus staged the production that included the Persians, with Pericles serving as choregos.

Euripides () ( c. 480 – 406 BC ) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Euripides first competed in the City Dionysia, the famous Athenian dramatic festival, in 455 BC, one year after the death of Aeschylus, and it was not until 441 BC that he won a first prize.

Many more errors came from the tendency of actors to interpolate words and sentences, producing so many corruptions and variations that a law was proposed by Lycurgus of Athens in 330 BC "... that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should be written down and preserved in a public office ; and that the town clerk should read the text over with the actors ; and that all performances which did not comply with this regulation should be illegal.

Prometheus Bound, perhaps the most famous treatment of the myth to be found among the Greek tragedies, is traditionally attributed to the 5th-century BC Greek tragedian Aeschylus.

* 484 BC: Athenian playwright Aeschylus wins a poetry prize

* 472 BC: The tragedy The Persians is produced by Aeschylus.

* 468 BC: Sophocles, Greek playwright, defeats Aeschylus for the Athenian Prize.

* Aeschylus of Athens, playwright ( 525 – 456 BC )

* 778 BC: Agamestor, King of Athens, dies after a reign of 17 years and is succeeded by his son Aeschylus.

* 755 BC: Aeschylus, King of Athens, dies after a reign of 23 years and is succeeded by Alcmaeon.

Although early authors such as Aeschylus refer in passing to Menelaus ' early life, detailed sources are quite late, post-dating 5th-century BC Greek tragedy.

* 525 BC — Aeschylus, author of Greek tragedies ( d. 456 BC )

These supposed male delegations of the powers at Delphi as expressed by Aeschylus are not borne out by the usual modern reconstruction of the sacred site's pre-Olympian history.

The image of man which enters into force with Aeschylus is still vital in Phedre and Athalie.

In Aeschylus ' Oresteia trilogy, Clytemnestra kills her husband, King Agamemnon because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to proceed forward with the Trojan war, and Cassandra, a prophetess of Apollo.

He was acquitted, with the jury sympathetic to the wounds that Aeschylus and his brother Cynegeirus suffered at Marathon.

More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to mere chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declinedhe became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes and Menander.

His plays and those of Aeschylus and Sophocles indicate a difference in outlook between the three mena generation gap probably due to the Sophistical enlightenment in the middle decades of the fifth century: Aeschylus still looked back to the archaic period, Sophocles was in transition between periods, and Euripides was fully imbued with the new spirit of the classical age.

Like Euripides, both Aeschylus and Sophocles created comic effects contrasting the heroic with the mundane but they employed minor supporting characters for that purpose whereas the younger poet was more insistent, using major characters too.

Aeschylus gained thirteen victories as a dramatist, Sophocles at least twenty, Euripides only four in his lifetime, and this has often been taken as an indication of the latter's unpopularity with his contemporaries, and yet a first place might not have been the main criterion for success in those times ( the system of selecting judges appears to have been flawed ) and merely being chosen to compete was in itself a mark of distinction.

Less than a hundred years later, Aristotle developed an almost " biological ' theory of the development of tragedy in Athens: according to this view, the art form grew under the influence of Aeschylus, matured in the hands of Sophocles then began its precipitous decline with Euripides.

The poem is not about World War I, but it does try to address the relationships between destruction and beauty, and, in this sense, it resonates with ancient Greek meditations on these matters, especially in the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Instead they have brought to the fore the literary qualities of the History, which they see as belonging to narrative tradition of Homer and Hesiod and as concerned with the concepts of justice and suffering found in Plato and Aristotle and problematized in Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Their grandson, Danaos, eventually returned to Greece with his fifty daughters ( the Danaids ), as recalled in Aeschylus ' play The Suppliants.

The ancients connected Io with the Moon, and in Aeschylus ' Prometheus Bound, where Io encounters Prometheus, she refers to herself as " the horned virgin ", both bovine and lunar.

" His career coincided with the ascendency of dramatic styles of poetry, as embodied in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles, and he is in fact one of the last poets of major significance within the more ancient tradition of purely lyric poetry.

His vocabulary shows the influence of Aeschylus with several words being common to both poets and found nowhere else.

Two passing references by Aeschylus link Zagreus with Hades ( Pluto ) and identify him as Hades ' son ; in his Cretan Men, which survives in quoted fragments, Aeschylus mentions the " thunders of the noctural Zagreus ".

After the first year, Eteocles refused to step down and Polynices attacked Thebes with his supporters ( as portrayed in the Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus and the Phoenician Women by Euripides ).

Harpies as ugly winged bird-women, e. g. in Aeschylus ' The Eumenides ( line 50 ) are a late development, due to a confusion with the Sirens.

Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph.

During the Battle of the Somme, he spent an entire day wounded and lying in a slit trench with a bullet in his pelvis, reading the classical Greek playwright Aeschylus in the original language.