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This paper has as its aim an analysis of "The Persians" by Aeschylus (456-525 BC) as an orientalist text. The theoretical framework for the study comes from Edward Said’s views about orientalism as well as the colonial discourse theory. Taking the first extant Greek tragedy as a founding text of orientalism, a notion confirmed by Said himself, the paper tries to trace and analyze its orientalist conceptions of Persia and the East.
The text discussed is considered as an "archive", in the Foucauldian sense, of topics, motifs and imaginings about









Persia and the Orient (luxury, fabulous riches, proud display, eroticism,
despotism, etc.). In "The Persians" we see the first recorded East / West encounter in a Western literary text, that is, the first (literary) representation of the Orient from the Western point of view. Appearing as the "other" of Greece Persia is simultaneously the object of fascination and abomination, which manifests the split discourse of the play. This split discursive practice is also taken on board. "The Persians", it is argued, is a highly important "petit recite" in the "grand narrative" of orientalism.