“Sons of the Greeks, advance! Deliver your country, deliver your children and your wives, the temples of your fathers’ gods, the tombs of your ancestors. Now is the contest which decides all!” (p.52 – 3)
So Aeschylus, the great Athenian tragedian wrote in his classic work The Persians. This tragedy chronicles the heroism of the Greeks, with the Athenians at the prow, in defending Greece against the invading Persian armies. The same words were recited in the great Greek theater of Syracuse only a matter of decades before the few survivors of the failed Athenian expedition were imprisoned in the adjacent quarries. They highlight the change in the Athenians from heroic defenders of freedom to doomed invaders seeking hegemony. The irony is not lost on the modern observer, and likely was not lost on those unlucky Athenians. Pictured here is the theatre as it looks today.