Several Byzantine authors, mostly from the twelfth century, cite or allude to Aeschylean lines. Eustathius of Thessalonica (twelfth century) is the first to report that the Byzantine political verse was thought to be similar to some trochaic tetrameter catalectics found in Persae. Psellus (eleventh century) anticipated some of the arguments used recently to challenge the authenticity of Prometheus. Some early Church Fathers (e.g., St Basil, Theodoret of Cyrus) refer positively to Aeschylus’ grandiloquence, while later Byzantine scholars (Michael Psellus, John Tzetzes) consider Aeschylus difficult and obscure. Demetrius Triclinius (fourteenth century) was the leading Byzantine scholar on Greek tragedy and made an original and lasting contribution to the textual criticism of Aeschylus. Modern scholars sometimes allow for two incompatible views: a very limited number of independent witnesses throughout Byzantium and, at the same time, a significant number of variant readings which they do not assign to Byzantine scholars. There are also a number of variant readings that are difficult to evaluate, and it is unclear if these are ancient or simply the conjectures of Byzantine scholars. The manuscript transmission is not good for the rest of the plays and there are cases where it is impossible to recover what Aeschylus wrote. A selection of three plays, Prometheus Vinctus, Septem contra Thebas, and Persae, the so-called ‘Byzantine triad’, is found in many more manuscripts than the rest, often with marginal commentaries for school use. Aeschylus was rather less known in Byzantium than Euripides and Sophocles, but was nonetheless read at schools and there survive several references, citations and allusions in a variety of texts.
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