Darius
ancestor underworld Greek single tradition · 1
In Aeschylus' play Persae, the ghost of the Persian king Darius appears to the queen and chorus, delivering a prophecy about future battles. The apparition is portrayed as a dead royal spirit capable of foretelling events, though its predictions are limited and sometimes inaccurate. This ghostly figure embodies the ancient belief in ancestral spirits influencing the living.
When
- First attested
- 470 BCE
- Attested period
- -470 – 2020
- Historical notes
- The ghost appears in the 5th‑century BCE tragedy Persae, attributed to Aeschylus.
Sources
encyclopedia (1)
- peer reviewed
Source passages
“Aeschylus always has a taste for the unseen and the supernatural; and one effective incident here is the raising of Darius’s ghost, and his prophecy of the disastrous battle of Plataea.”
#43800 · extracted by openai/gpt-oss-120b:free