How The Persians drew on The Iliad
A documented line of influence: Aeschylus demonstrably engaged Homer’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Iliad
Homer · c. 750 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
The Persians
Aeschylus · 472 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
5/10
On The Persians’s page
- The source Aeschylus drank from — he called his tragedies "slices from the great banquets of Homer," and The Persians is one of those slices
- The play dresses Xerxes and Darius in Iliad language, lending its Persian kings the "godlike hero" weight Homer gave Achilles and Hector
- Read Homer first and the borrowed grandeur lands — you hear epic diction repurposed for the elegy of a routed empire
On The Iliad’s page
- Aeschylus called his own plays "slices from the great banquets of Homer" — The Persians eats from this table
- Xerxes and the ghost of Darius wear Homeric epithets, given the "godlike hero" grandeur the Iliad reserved for its warriors
- The tragic stage borrows Homer's scale of suffering and turns it on a defeated enemy