Aeschylus

Aeschylus was an ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy; academic understanding of the genre and of earlier Greek tragedy is largely based on inferences from his surviving plays. He wrote an estimated seventy to ninety plays, of which only seven survive complete, and was likely the first dramatist to present plays as a trilogy, his Oresteia being the only extant ancient example. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters permitted onstage and allowed conflict among them, where earlier characters had interacted only with the chorus. His play The Persians, concerned with the Persian invasion of Greece, is one of very few surviving classical Greek tragedies to address contemporary events, and his epitaph commemorates his part in the Greek victory at Marathon without mentioning his career as a playwright.