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| 527 | Peisistratos died. |
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| 525 | Birth at Eleusis, in Attica, of Æschylos, son of Euphorion. |
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| 510 | Expulsion of the PeisistratidÆ. Democratic constitution of Cleisthenes. |
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| Approximate date of incident in the legend that Æschylos was set to watch grapes as they were ripening for the vintage, and fell asleep; and lo! as he slept Dionysos appeared to him and bade him give himself to write tragedies for the great festival of the god. And when he awoke, he found himself invested with new powers of thought and utterance, and the work was as easy to him as if he had been trained to it for many years (Pausan, Att. i. 21, § 3).[1] |
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| 500 | Birth of Anaxagoras. |
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| 499 | Æschylos exhibited his first tragedy, in unsuccessful competition with Pratinas and Choerilos. |
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| The wooden scaffolding broke beneath the crowd of spectators, and the accident led the Athenians to build their first stone theatre for the Dionysiac festivals. |
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| Partly out of annoyance at his defeat, it is said, and partly in a spirit of adventure, Æschylos sailed for Sicily. |
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| 497 | Death of Pythagoras (?). |
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| 495 | Birth of Sophocles at Colonos. |
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| 491 | Æschylos at Athens. |
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| 490 | The Battle of Marathon. Æschylos and his brothers, KynÆgeiros and Ameinias, so distinguished themselves, that the Athenians ordered their heroic deeds to be commemorated in a picture. |
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| Death of Theognis (?). |
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| 488 | Prize awarded to Simonides for an elegy on Marathon. Æschylos, piqued, it is said, at his failure in the competition, again departed to Sicily. |
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| 485 | Xerxes succeeded Dareios. |
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| 484 | Æschylos won, in a dramatic contest with Pratinas, Choerilos, and Phrynichos, the first of a series of thirteen successes. |
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| Birth of Herodotos. |
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| 480 | Athens burnt by Xerxes. |
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| Æschylos fought at Artemisium and Salamis. At Salamis his brother Ameinias lost his hand, and was awarded the prize of valour. |
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| Sophocles led the Chorus of Victory. |
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| Birth of Euripides. |
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| 479 | Æschylos at the Battle of PlatÆa. |
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| 477 | Commencement of Athenian supremacy. |
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| 473 | Æschylos carried off the first prize with The Persians (the first of the extant plays), which belonged to a tetralogy that included two tragedies, Phineus and Glaucos, and a satyric drama, Prometheus the Fire-stealer. |
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| The Persians has the interest of being a contemporary record of the great sea-fight at Salamis by an eye-witness. |
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| 471 | Æschylos appears to have produced this year his next tetralogy, of which The Seven against Thebes survives. |
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| The play was directed against the policy of aiming at the supremacy of Athens by attacking other Greek States, and, in brief, maintained the policy of Aristeides as against that of Themistocles. |
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| Birth of Thucydides. |
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| 468 | Sophocles gained his first victory in tragedy with his Triptolemos; Æschylos defeated. |
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| Æschylos charged with impiety, on the ground that he had profaned the Mysteries by introducing on the stage rites known only to the initiated; tried and acquitted; departure for Syracuse. |
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| 467 | Æschylos at the court of Hieron at Syracuse, where he is said to have composed dramas on local legends, such as The Women of Ætna. |
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| Death of Simonides. |
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| 461 | Ostracism of Kimon; ascendency of Pericles. |
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| 460-59 | Probable date of The Suppliants, if the play be connected with the alliance between Argos and Athens (B.C. 461), and the war with the Persian forces in Egypt, upon which the Athenians had entered as allies of the Libyan Prince Inaros. (B.C. 460.) |
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| The date of Prometheus Bound has been referred to B.C. 470 on the strength of a description of Ætna (vv. 370-380), which is supposed to be a reference to the eruption of B.C. 477. Internal evidence, however, seems to warrant the view that The Suppliants and the Prometheus Bound were separated by only a brief interval of time. |
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| 458 | Æschylos in Athens. He found new men and new methods; institutions, held most sacred as the safeguard of Athenian religion, were being criticised and attacked; the Court of Areiopagos was threatened with abolition under pretence of reform. |
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| Production of the Oresteian Trilogy (or, rather, tetralogy, as in addition to the Agamemnon, the Libation-pourers, and the Eumenides, there was a satyric drama, Proteus). |
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| This trilogy was a conservative protest, religious, social, and political, which culminated in the assertion of the divine authority of the Areiopagos. |
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| Popular feeling was once more excited against the poet, who left Athens never to return, and settled at Gela, in Sicily, under the patronage of Hieron. |
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| 456 | Death of Æschylos, aged 69. |
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| An oracle foretold that he was to die by a blow from heaven, and according to the legend, an eagle, mistaking the poet's head for a stone as he sat writing, dropped a tortoise on it to break the shell. |
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| He was buried at Gela, and his epitaph, ascribed to himself, ran: “Beneath this stone lies Æschylos, son of Euphorion. At fertile Gela he died. Marathon can tell of his tested 1.Cf., the legend of Caedmon, “the Father of English Song.”
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