Aeschylus

Athenian tragic poet (c. 525–456), the earliest of the three great Attic tragedians and the only one who served in the Persian Wars. He fought at Marathon — where his brother Cynegirus died trying to hold a Persian ship by the stern-cable — and at Salamis, and his self-chosen epitaph at Gela in Sicily commemorated only his Marathon service, not his poetry. His *Persae* of 472 BC is the only surviving Greek tragedy on a contemporary-historical subject and the only surviving eyewitness account of Salamis by a participant, staged just eight years after the battle in front of an audience that included every surviving hoplite who had rowed at Salamis. The battle narrative includes the trumpet-cry at dawn, the paean to free the fathers' graves, the Greek line curving to bar the straits, and the Persian ships packed in the narrows where the prows could not bring their beaks to bear.

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