Aeschylus' drama was a model for Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1821 Hellas: A Lyrical Drama, his final published poetical work before his death in 1822. T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, "The Burial of the Dead", line 63 "I had not thought Death had undone so many" echoes line 432 of the Messenger account in The Persians: "However, you can be sure that so great a multitude of men never perished in a single day",[25] which is also similar to Dante's line in Inferno, Canto III, lines 56–57: ch'i' non averei creduto/Che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.[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.[30] The excerpts from The Persians enter a context of fragmentation whereby broken syntax is evocative of a landscape in the aftermath of war.[31]
