Read Online The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly - Free Book Online

original function of the Areopagus, and is thus tacitly supporting Pericles’ reforms. Whatever our interpretation, Aristophanes tells us that Aeschylus had a rather combative and critical relationship with his fellow citizens.
    The enigmatic Eleusinian Mysteries of his birthplace offer a different reason for the bad blood between Aeschylus and the Athenians. From Aelian and Clement of Alexandria we learn that he was charged with revealing the Mysteries on the stage. At some point—aggravatingly, the sources do not record which, exactly—the audience was so enraged by the blatant infraction that Aeschylus was nearly murdered onstage and had to seek refuge in the temple of his onetime mentor, Dionysus. Sicily may have been altogether safer for someone who had, in Aristotle’s words, “spoken those things of which it is impious to tell.”
    What secrets had he let slip? The Eleusinian Mysteries, supposedly, promised an afterlife. Homer had depicted the listless wasting-away that awaited even the heroic dead: the Mysteries offered an alternative. Just as Demeter had rescued her daughter Persephone from the Underworld, an initiate would not be trapped with the melancholic wraiths in the kingdom of Hades, but reach a paradisiacal place called the Elysian Fields. In
The Frogs,
Aeschylus boasts that although he is indeed confined to Hades, his name lives on in his work: of all the playwrights, only his plays are still staged after his death. Did the idea of literary immortality make him lax or dismissive about the orthodox paths to eternal life? Poets have always claimed that their work guarantees a kind of immortality. Aeschylus may have taken this boast more literally than the religious arbiters of his day thought fit.
    Aeschylus did not know that his artistic canonization only occurred by the narrowest of margins. He had been warned in a prophecy that his own death would come by a blow from heaven, and, one presumes, made sure he did not sit under trees in Sicily’s countryside and run the risk of the appointed lightning bolt suddenly striking home. He probably even enjoyed the sunshine on his wrinkled, hairless head, musing about dear old Phrynicus; the excellence of Homer; Orpheus, who made the first lyre from a tortoise shell; and how he would be remembered.
    He was not cremated—the epitaph tells us as much. But could he imagine that
The Priestesses, Bassarides, Phineus, The Carding Women,
The Sphinx, Europa, Hypsipyle, Niobe, Nereids, Oedipus, Laius, The
Archer Maidens, Semele, The Nurses of Dionysus, Lycurgus, Atalanta,
Nemea, The Award of the Arms, Mysians, Myrmidons, Sisyphus Rolling
the Stone, Sisyphus the Runaway, The Net Drawers, The Bacchae, The
Kabeiroi
(or
Drunken Heroes
),
Palamedes, Penelope, Pentheus, Perseus,
Philoctetes, Phorcides, Psychostasia
and
Polydectes, The Young Men
and
Glaucus of the Sea, The Women of Salamis
and
The Women of Thrace,
and many, many others would end as ash?
    Aeschylus may have suspected his works deserved pride of place in a magnificent library. He knew enough about war to know temples were looted and palaces despoiled. He was acquainted with the whim of tyrants, and their penchant for surrounding themselves with genius. But no one could predict that the sole copy of his plays would become a casualty in a religious war between two theologies a thousand years in the future.

Sophocles
    {495–406 B.C.E.}
    THE GREEKS VENERATED Aeschylus and were challenged by Euripides; Sophocles, however, they loved. Even the rebarbative Aristophanes, in his lit-crit comedy
The Frogs,
gave a heartfelt tribute to the recently deceased playwright, saying that “Sophocles is getting on with everyone in Hades just as he did on earth.” Another comedian, Eupolis, eulogized him as “the happiest of men.”
    Born in 495 B.C.E. in the provincial town of Colonus, Sophocles first comes to attention in 480, when he was chosen to sing, play the lyre, and, on account of