Персы Эсхила: Древнегреческая трагедия

Classical Greek tragedy by Aeschylus

The Persians (Πέρσαι, Persai, Latinised as Persae) is an ancient Greek tragedy written during the Classical period of Ancient Greece by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus. It is the second and only surviving part of a now otherwise lost trilogy that won the first prize at the dramatic competitions in Athens' City Dionysia festival in 472 BC, with Pericles serving as choregos.

Aeschylus was not the first to write a play about the Persians — his older contemporary Phrynichus wrote two plays about them. The first, The Sack of Miletus (written in 493 BC, 21 years before Aeschylus' play), concerned the destruction of an Ionian colony of Athens in Asia Minor by the Persians. For his portrayal of this brutal defeat, which emphasized Athens' abandonment of its colony, Phrynichus was fined and a law passed forbidding subsequent performances of his play. The second, Phoenician Women (written in 476 BC, four years before Aeschylus' version), treated the same historical event as Aeschylus' Persians. Neither of Phrynichus' plays have survived. Interpretations of Persians either read the play as sympathetic toward the defeated Persians or else as a celebration of Greek victory within the context of an ongoing war. The sympathetic school has the considerable weight of Aristotelian criticism behind it; indeed, every other extant Greek tragedy arguably invites an audience's sympathy for one or more characters on stage. The celebratory school argues that the play is part of a xenophobic culture that would find it difficult to sympathize with its hated barbarian enemy during a time of war. During the play, Xerxes calls his pains "a joy to my enemies" (line 1034).

According to a scholium at Aristophanes' Frogs 1028, Hiero of Syracuse at some point invited Aeschylus to reproduce The Persians in Sicily. Seventy years after the play was produced, the comic playwright Aristophanes mentions an apparent Athenian reproduction of The Persians in his Frogs (405 BC). In it, he has Aeschylus describe The Persians as "an effective sermon on the will to win. Best thing I ever wrote"; while Dionysus says that he "loved that bit where they sang about the days of the great Darius, and the chorus went like this with their hands and cried 'Wah! Wah!'" (1026–28). The Persians was popular in the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire, who also fought wars with the Persians, and its popularity has endured in modern Greece. According to Anthony Podlecki, during a production at Athens in 1965 the audience "rose to its feet en masse and interrupted the actors' dialogue with cheers." The American Peter Sellars directed an important production of The Persians at the Edinburgh Festival and Los Angeles Festival in 1993, which articulated the play as a response to the Gulf War of 1990–1991. The production was in a new translation by Robert Auletta. It opened at the Royal Lyceum Theatre on 16 August 1993. Hamza El Din composed and performed its music, with additional music by Ben Halley Jr. and sound design by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger. The production starred Len Cariou as Darius and Michael Stuhlbarg as Xerxes. A 2010 translation by Aaron Poochigian included for the first time the detailed notes for choral odes that Aeschylus himself created, which directed lines to be spoken by specific parts of the chorus (strophe and antistrophe). Using Poochigian's edition, which includes theatrical notes and stage directions, "Persians" was presented in a staged read through as part of New York's WorkShop Theater Company's Spring 2011 one act festival "They That Have Borne the Battle." Also in 2010, Kaite O'Reilly's award winning translation was produced on Sennybridge Training Area (a military range in the Brecon Beacons) by National Theatre Wales. Audiences valued the way this production required them to shift their attention between the spectacular landscape surrounding them, the particular history of the area, and the modern adaptation of the ancient Greek text performed onstage. The work went on to win O'Reilly the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, presented by the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Οn the occasion of the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Salamis, on July 25, 2020, Persians was the first Ancient Greek tragedy that was played at its natural environment, i. e. the open air theatre of Epidaurus, and was live streamed internationally via YouTube. The play was a production of the Hellenic National Theatre and was directed by Dimitrios Lignadis as part of the Epidaurus Festival. Actors delivered the play in Ancient and Modern Greek, while English subtitles were projected on YouTube. The play is currently in production as one of a double bill in the 2022 Cambridge Greek Play. In March 2024 Dublin's Abbey Theatre staged the first Irish language translation of the play by poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

Aeschylus' drama was a model for Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1821 Hellas: A Lyrical Drama, his final published poetical work before his death in 1822. T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, "The Burial of the Dead", line 63 "I had not thought Death had undone so many" echoes line 432 of the Messenger account in The Persians: "However, you can be sure that so great a multitude of men never perished in a single day", which is also similar to Dante's line in Inferno, Canto III, lines 56–57: ch'i' non averei creduto/Che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta. In modern literature, Dimitris Lyacos in his dystopian epic Z213: Exit uses quotations from the Messenger's account in The Persians (δίψῃ πονοῦντες, οἱ δ᾽ ὑπ᾽ ἄσθματος κενοὶ: some, faint from thirst, while some of us, exhausted and panting) in order to convey the failure of a military operation and the subsequent retreat of the troops in a post apocalyptic setting. The excerpts from The Persians enter a context of fragmentation whereby broken syntax is evocative of a landscape in the aftermath of war.