It is the second and only surviving part of a now otherwise lost trilogy that won the first prize at the dramatic competitions in Athens' City Dionysia festival in 472 BC, with Pericles serving as choregos.

[4][5] Another fragment from Prometheus Pyrkaeus was translated by Herbert Weir Smyth as "And do thou guard thee well lest a blast strike thy face; for it is sharp, and deadly-scorching its hot breaths".

Set freeYour fatherland, set free your children, wives,Places of your ancestral gods and tombs of your ancestors!Forward for all[7]In the original, this reads: ὦ παῖδες Ἑλλήνων ἴτε,ἐλευθεροῦτε πατρίδ', ἐλευθεροῦτε δὲπαῖδας, γυναῖκας, θεῶν τέ πατρῴων ἕδη,θήκας τε προγόνων: νῦν ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀγών.At the tomb of her dead husband Darius, Atossa asks the chorus to summon his ghost: "Some remedy he knows, perhaps,/Knows ruin's cure" they say.

Before departing, the ghost of Darius prophesies another Persian defeat at the Battle of Plataea (479 BC): "Where the plain grows lush and green,/Where Asopus' stream plumps rich Boeotia's soil,/The mother of disasters awaits them there,/Reward for insolence, for scorning God.

For his portrayal of this brutal defeat, which emphasized Athens' abandonment of its colony, Phrynichus was fined and a law passed forbidding subsequent performances of his play.

[11] The sympathetic school has the considerable weight of Aristotelian criticism behind it; indeed, every other extant Greek tragedy arguably invites an audience's sympathy for one or more characters on stage.

[18] Ellen McLaughlin translated Persians in 2003 for Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre in New York as a response to George Bush's invasion of Iraq.

A 2010 translation by Aaron Poochigian[20] included for the first time the detailed notes for choral odes that Aeschylus himself created, which directed lines to be spoken by specific parts of the chorus (strophe and antistrophe).

"[21] Also in 2010, Kaite O'Reilly's award-winning translation was produced on Sennybridge Training Area (a military range in the Brecon Beacons) by National Theatre Wales.

Audiences valued the way this production required them to shift their attention between the spectacular landscape surrounding them, the particular history of the area, and the modern adaptation of the ancient Greek text performed onstage.

Οn the occasion of the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Salamis, on July 25, 2020, Persians was the first Ancient Greek tragedy that was played at its natural environment, i.e. the open-air theatre of Epidaurus, and was live streamed internationally via YouTube.

[26] In modern literature, Dimitris Lyacos in his dystopian epic[27] Z213: Exit uses quotations from the Messenger's account[28] in The Persians (δίψῃ πονοῦντες, οἱ δ᾽ ὑπ᾽ ἄσθματος κενοὶ: some, faint from thirst, while some of us, exhausted and panting[29]) in order to convey the failure of a military operation and the subsequent retreat of the troops in a post-apocalyptic setting.