The Political Sympathies of Aeschylus

Extract

Modern writers have generally assumed that the political affiliations of Aeschylus were aristocratic. That his sympathies were with the democrats has, however, been ably maintained by Sir R. W. Livingstone on the basis of a consideration of the Eumenides, a play which explicitly exalts the aristocratic court of the Areopagus, and has usually been taken as proof of Aeschylus' opposition to the democratic measures of Ephialtes and Pericles. Livingstone bases his argument upon the eloquent enthusiasm of the poet for Athens' future, and upon the fact that the functions assigned the Areopagus in the play are those which it still retained after the democratic reforms of Ephialtes, not those of which it had been despoiled.