InJHScvii (1987), I argued that the Festival of the Great Dionysia needed to be seen in the context of fifth-century Athenian culture and that the plays which make up a major part of this festival could be seen as offering a profoundly questioning attitude towards what might be called fifth-century Athenian democraticpolisi ideology. One play which seems to fit uneasily into that description of Athenian tragedy—as indeed it fits uneasily into many general arguments about Athenian theatre—is Aeschylus'Persae. In this brief paper I want to suggest some ways in which the social and political context I outlined in my earlier paper may help us to understand certain elements of thePersaewhich have worried critics.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 121 citations exist upstream.