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Example research essay topic: Persia Is Ruined Persians - 757 words

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The ghost of King Darius is seen to be unaware of the loss, but when he does learn of it, he blames his son Xerxes for the failure. He places the blame for the defeat squarely in the hands of the Persians, stating that What is this unexpected ill that weighs the Persians down? [Line 694 ] Obviously, we are meant to accept his version of events: that there is an ill that is plaguing the country, and that that is why they have lost the battle. Queen Atossa agrees with him, lamenting that: O you who in prosperity surpassed all mortal men by your happy destiny, Since, so long as you gazed upon the beams of the sun, You lived a life of felicity, envied of all, in Persian eyes a god, So now too I consider you fortunate in that you died Before you beheld the depth of our calamities. The whole tale, O Darius, you will hear in brief space of time: The power of Persia is ruined almost utterly. [Lines 710 - 17 ] Atossa, like her husbands ghost, believes that Persia is ruined. In this manner, Aeschylus leaves his audience in no doubt that the enemy themselves believe that they are lost. Their spirits are broken, and they have no faith in themselves or their country.

The messenger, on the other hand, reveals that the Greeks were proclaiming slogans of faith in their countrys grandeur and power. We are left in no doubt as to which is the greater army. It is only an army that has faith in its country and its leaders that can hope to win a war. Xerxes, the tragic hero of the play, comes in late and is not really given the opportunity for character growth.

He does not do much more than lament about the fate of his people, and his failure to lead them into victory: Alas, wretched am I who have met this cruel doom which did not give the faintest sign of its coming! In what savage mood has Fortune trampled upon the Persian race? What misery is yet in store for me, unhappy wretch? The strength of my limbs is loosened as I look upon this aged group of citizens.

Ah, Zeus, I wish that the doom of death had buried me, too, together with the men who have been laid low! [Lines 910 - 17 ] Poor Xerxes cannot do much apart from wishing that death had taken him too; he is left with little choice in the matter. The chorus agrees with him, and joins in his lamentations. Instead of consoling him, they agree that he is at fault, that his men have died for him, and that he is responsible for crowding Hades with their dead souls: The land bewails her native youth, slaughtered for Xerxes, who has crowded Hades with Persian slain. Many warriors, masters of the bow, our country's pride, a great multitude of men, have perished. Alas, alas, for our trusty defence! The land of Asia, the leading power of the earth, has piteously, yes piteously, been bowed to her knees. [Lines 924 - 31 ] As is apparent from Xerxes prayer to Zeus, Aeschylus neither knew nor seemed to care about the gods that the Persians worshipped.

His intention was only to show that the Persians were lesser mortals, and he did not bother to research their culture or their beliefs. The chorus even assumes that the dead have gone to Hades. Why should dead Persians go to a Greek hell? The lines smack of prejudice and ignorance, and one is forcibly reminded again of Said's thesis in Orientalism. Thomas Harrison suggests in his book The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus' "Persians" and the History of the Fifth Century that Aeschylus is doing something other than, for example, what Herodotus was doing in his Histories.

Harrison seems to be outlining the difference between history and historiography. While Aeschylus seems to be creating a historiography an act of writing about a political event from a contemporary point of view to understand it implications, rather than to record the event in historical terms his text does not really encourage the reader to look at it from an objective, retrospective perspective. Instead, his view seems more biased and subjective than the perspective of a historiographer ought to be; for example, he looks at the war only from the perspective of the Persians, and even they (as the messengers testimony indicates) seem to be admiring the valor of the Greeks.


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