Aeschylus's The Persians is the earliest Greek play – and
therefore the earliest play in the western tradition – to
survive complete. It is also quite atypical of Greek tragedy.
The plots of other extant tragedies in the Athenian corpus
traffic with the deep mythological past. Aeschylus's own
Oresteia, for instance, chooses as its starting point the
nostos, the return home, of the victorious general Agamemnon
after the siege of Troy. Like most other Greek tragedies the
first play of the trilogy, Agamemnon, selects a fragment of
Homer – in this case the king's violent death, as narrated by
Menelaus in the Odyssey – and builds a mighty edifice from it.
Or take Euripides's The Trojan Women, a "what happened next"
continuation that deals with the horrific fate of the female
members of Ilium's royal family after the city's overthrow. The
Persians is quite different. First produced in 472BC, its
subject is how the news of a crushing and thoroughly unlikely
defeat by the Greeks – which took place a mere eight years