Aeschylus was born at Athens in 525/24 B.C., and he died at Gela in 456/55 B.C. A scion of an old aristocratic family in the deme of Eleusis, he was in touch with many of the leading poets of his generation - with Pindar and Simonides, for instance. He was a combatant at the land battle of Marathon and the sea battle of Salamis. He went to Syracuse at least twice, at the invitation of the city's tyrannos Hieron.

His first plays can be dated to 499/98. It is reckoned that he wrote some eighty plays in all. Of some we know nothing but the titles; others have survived in fragments; while seven tragedies only have come down to us entire, and of these only three form a trilogy. He won first prize with thirteen of his plays.

Aeschylus wrote tetralogies, their parts being a thematic unity. The three tragedies (trilogies) were taken from one and the same cycle of myths, and had an intrinsic time coherence. The satyr play was frequently an enjoyable thematic contrast.

Aeschylus lived at a time when Athens was undergoing important changes. The experience of unforeseen victory over the Persians led to very swift political innovations. The most important of these was undoubtedly the establishment of the city as the area where the citizens were active and deigned. For Aeschylus, as for Sophocles or Herodotus, the city was the area in which all the contradictions people were exposed to in everyday life were absorbed. On this view, divine, human and natural forces were in lasting rivalry. As a result, a person having to take a decision before acting was in a constant state of helplessness. Aeschylus' own position was that the city was the unique place of communication within which order could obtain. As his only surviving trilogy, the Oresteia, demonstrates, the playwright through his plays assisted the spectator to objectivize the realities of the time and to understand them.