Prometheus Bound

Overview

Prometheus Bound is sixty pages, and almost nothing happens in it. The central character is fixed to a rock from the first minutes and cannot move for the rest of the play. Visitors come, talk to him, and leave. That is the entire action, and the tension is generated by a single question repeated four times in different mouths: will he give in?

It is the most disputed text in Greek tragedy. Transmitted under Aeschylus’ name and printed with his plays, it has been doubted since the nineteenth century on grounds of metre, vocabulary, the unusual staging demands, and above all theology: the Aeschylus of the Oresteia is preoccupied with a Zeus whose justice works itself out over generations, and this play presents Zeus as a recent usurper behaving like a despot. Martin West and Mark Griffith argue it is by someone else, perhaps Aeschylus’ son Euphorion. Others defend the attribution and point out that it may have been resolved in the lost sequel. The honest position is that nobody knows, and most modern editions say so on the title page.

It was the first part of a trilogy. Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bearer are lost, and we know from fragments and later summaries that in the second play Heracles shot the eagle and Prometheus was reconciled with Zeus. That changes everything about how to read this one, since the defiance we are given was designed to be resolved in a play we do not have.

What happens

The opening is extraordinary and depends on silence. Hephaestus is brought to a wilderness at the edge of the world by two figures, Kratos and Bia, Power and Violence, and ordered to chain Prometheus to a rock. Hephaestus does not want to; he says so; Kratos bullies him through it, line by line, while the smith drives a wedge through the Titan’s chest. Prometheus says nothing at all through the whole scene, which may be the boldest use of silence in ancient theatre.

Left alone, he speaks, calling on the air, the winds, the rivers, the sea and the sun to see what a god suffers from gods.

The chorus of Oceanids arrives, flying, drawn by the sound of hammering. They are sympathetic and frightened. Prometheus tells them what he did. When Zeus overthrew Cronus and divided the honours among the gods, he intended to destroy the human race and make a new one, and Prometheus alone opposed him, stopped mortals from foreseeing their own death by putting blind hopes in them, and gave them fire.

Ocean comes next, on a winged creature, offering to go and intercede with Zeus and advising accommodation. Prometheus declines, warns him he will only get himself into trouble, and sends him away.

Then the catalogue, and it is the heart of the play. Asked what else he did, Prometheus describes what human beings were like before him: living in caves like ants, without knowledge of building, of the seasons, of number or writing. He taught them the risings and settings of stars, number, the combining of letters, the yoking of animals, the ship with its sails, the medicines that keep off disease, the reading of omens, and the metals hidden in the earth. Every art that mortals have, he says, comes from Prometheus.

Io enters, a girl transformed into a heifer, driven across the world by a gadfly because Zeus desired her and Hera was jealous. She is the only other victim on stage, and the scene sets a long punishment against an unending one. Prometheus tells her where she has been and where she must still go, an enormous geography of suffering, and tells her that in the thirteenth generation a descendant of hers will free him. That descendant is Heracles.

He also reveals what he knows and Zeus does not: that there is a marriage which will produce a son stronger than his father. The name, Thetis, is withheld.

Hermes arrives to demand it. The exchange is contemptuous on both sides. Prometheus calls him a servant, says he would not exchange his own misery for that errand, and refuses under threat of the eagle that will tear his liver every day forever. Hermes warns the chorus to leave; they refuse and stay with him. Thunder, earthquake, and the rock goes down into the abyss with Prometheus still speaking, calling on his mother Earth and the sky to see how unjustly he suffers.

How to read it

Read the opening scene watching for Prometheus’ silence, and notice how long it lasts. It is about ninety lines, and the effect is enormous.

Read the catalogue of arts at lines 442 to 506 as a philosophical statement. It is an account of civilisation as a set of techniques, acquired at a particular moment, against the will of the gods, and it is the reason the play keeps being revived whenever technology becomes an argument.

Keep the lost trilogy in mind. Almost every strong reading of this play, as a hymn to rebellion or as a study of two kinds of obstinacy, is a reading of one third of a work whose resolution we cannot see.

Watch the visitors as a sequence. Hephaestus is sympathetic and complies; Ocean is sympathetic and advises compromise; Io is a fellow victim; Hermes is the voice of the regime. Each offers a different relation to power, and Prometheus refuses all four.

Read Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound afterwards if the figure interests you. Shelley knew the ancient sequel ended in reconciliation and said in his preface that he could not bear to write a champion of mankind shaking hands with his oppressor, so he wrote a different ending on purpose.

Questions it raises

• Is Prometheus heroic or merely obstinate? Ocean and Hermes both call it stubbornness, and the play gives them arguments.
• He gave mortals fire and also blind hopes, so that they would stop foreseeing their deaths. Is the second gift a kindness?
• Zeus never appears. What does keeping the tyrant offstage do to the play?
• Prometheus has foreknowledge of everything, including his own torment, and chose it. Does that make the suffering easier to watch or harder?
• The Oceanids stay with him when leaving would be safe and sensible. Why does the play end with that choice?
• If the trilogy ended in reconciliation, does that change what this play means, or is the surviving third now a different work?