The first fact about Aeschylus is a source limit. The richest objects are seven plays in medieval books and a slope of stone in Athens. The richest stories about his life are late. A dossier that treats the tortoise as a coroner is a joke. A dossier that treats the Oresteia as a UN covenant is a sermon.
Loss of the majority; disputed Prometheus; blood-feud teaching; a court settlement that later feminist readers named as patriarchal; Persians as a 1990s war poster; choregic wealth; tourist crowding; vita cartoons. Those are dated as editions and receptions.
The offsets are dated: 1518 print, Laurenziana catalogues, 1922 Loeb, Perseus, 1972 OCT, 2008 Loeb, Cambridge play, Hellenic Festival, UNESCO Acropolis and Epidaurus, 1981 Harrison/Hall, 2010s Suppliants. Those gains do not restore the lost tetralogies. They are separate paths.
What the score must not say: that he legislated the Areopagus; that 1987 undid loss; that a male 1981 company is 458; that Persians is only lament or only jingoism; that Sommerstein settled every line. Complex contribution is the honest type. Confidence is high on 1518–2008 books and on 1981 and UNESCO dates, medium on civic-welfare readings of the Eumenides, low on the vita.
Related people are Sophocles, Euripides, Smyth, Murray, Harrison, Hall, Sommerstein, Page.
1922 is not 458. 1987 is not a choregic inscription. The Mediceus is a medieval book described in modern catalogues. Epidaurus is a listed theatre that still sells nights of tragedy. If those distinctions feel pedantic, they are the alternative to a bust and the alternative to a theory seminar that never names a date.
What would change the picture: a contemporary didascalia archive with autograph titles; a securely attributed Prometheus; a measured series from a named production. Until then the dossier refuses fake birthdays and refuses fake eternity. Keep Loebs, the Mediceus, UNESCO theatres, and the 1981 Oresteia on separate dates.