Aeschylus is one of the great tragedians of Ancient Greece. Living in Athens during its ‘golden age’ in the fifth century BC, he wrote 80 plays. However, only seven of these have survived to the present.

Robert Potter (1721-1804) was an English clergyman and translator, who produced several translations of the Greek tragedies during his life. He published translations of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, establishing a widely adopted convention of translating the Greek hexameters (the standard classical poetic metre for epic and tragedy, used for the main speeches and dialogue) into blank verse and the chorus into rhyming couplets. His translation of Aeschylus (first published in 1777) dominated the market for over 50 years, being the only one available at the time.