SOURCE: "The War Plays, Persae, and Seven against Thebes, in Aeschylus: The Creator of Tragedy, Clarendon Press, 1940, pp. 111-43.

In the excerpt below, Murray surveys the structure and themes of Persians.

[The Persae] is not only a play: it is a direct historical record of one of the great events that have decided the destiny of Europe, the repulse of the invasion of Greece by Xerxes. It gives a detailed account of a great sea-battle fought more than two thousand four hundred years ago by one who was not only an eyewitness but a combatant, and one who, besides his Greek sense of poetry, had also the peculiar Greek power of describing what he saw. In some ways his account of the actual Battle of Salamis is better even than that of the historian Herodotus, writing forty years later with an abundance of carefully sifted material. True, the...