Esquilo: poeta de la guerra

Aeschylus was not only the first of the great tragedians: he was also a soldier who fought at Marathon and Salamis and experienced firsthand the horrors of war. In this illuminating essay, Marta González González invites us to reread his tragedies from a fresh perspective: that of a poet who gave voice to the vanquished. Through Cassandra (the enslaved Trojan princess), the terrified young women of Thebes, and the daughters of Danaus fleeing a forced marriage, Aeschylus wove a harrowing testament to sexual violence as a weapon of war, the trauma of exile, mourning for the dead, and the material and symbolic destruction of the victims. This denunciation of violence, freed by the author of this essay from the prejudices of later criticism in which it was buried, resonates today with the same force as it did then.