Prometheus Bound

Prometheus Bound

Vulcan Chaining Prometheus by Dirck van Baburen
Written by Aeschylus (disputed)
Chorus Oceanids
Characters Cratus
Bia
Hephaestus
Prometheus
Oceanus
Io
Hermes

Prometheus Bound (Ancient Greek: Προμηθεὺς Δεσμώτης, Promētheus Desmōtēs) is an Ancient Greek tragedy. In antiquity, it was attributed to Aeschylus, but is now considered by some scholars to be the work of another hand, and perhaps one as late as c. 415 BC.[1] Despite these doubts of authorship, the play's designation as Aeschylean has remained conventional. The tragedy is based on the myth of Prometheus, a Titan who defies the gods and gives fire to mankind, acts for which he is subjected to perpetual punishment.

Synopsis

The play is composed almost entirely of speeches and contains little action since its protagonist is chained and immobile throughout. At the beginning, Kratos (Authority), Bia (violence), and the smith-god Hephaestus chain the Titan Prometheus to a mountain in the Caucasus, with Hephaestus alone expressing reluctance and pity, and then departing. According to the author, Prometheus is being punished not only for stealing fire, but also for thwarting Zeus's plan to obliterate the human race. This punishment is especially galling since Prometheus was instrumental in Zeus's victory in the Titanomachy.

The Oceanids appear and attempt to comfort Prometheus by conversing with him. Prometheus cryptically tells them that he knows of a potential marriage that would lead to Zeus's downfall. A Titan named Oceanus commiserates with Prometheus and urges him to make peace with Zeus. Prometheus tells the chorus that the gift of fire to mankind was not his only benefaction; in the so-called Catalogue of the Arts (447-506), he reveals that he taught men all the civilizing arts, such as writing, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, architecture, and agriculture.

Prometheus is then visited by Io, a human maiden pursued by a lustful Zeus; the Olympian transformed Io into a cow, and a gadfly sent by Zeus's wife Hera has chased Io all the way from Argos. Prometheus forecasts Io's future travels, telling her that Zeus will eventually end her torment in Egypt, where she will bear a son named Epaphus. He says one of her descendants (an unnamed Heracles), thirteen generations hence, will release him from his own torment.

Finally, Hermes the messenger-god is sent down by the angered Zeus to demand that Prometheus tell him who threatens to overthrow him. Prometheus refuses, and Zeus strikes him with a thunderbolt that plunges Prometheus into the abyss.[2]

Prometheus Bound Staging by MacMillan Films in 2015

Departures from Hesiod

The treatment of the myth of Prometheus in Prometheus Bound is a radical departure from the earlier accounts found in Hesiod's Theogony (511-616) and Works and Days (42-105). Hesiod essentially portrays the Titan as a lowly trickster and semi-comic foil to Zeus's authority. Zeus's anger toward Prometheus is in turn responsible for mortal man's having to provide for himself; before, all of man's needs had been provided by the gods. Prometheus' theft of fire also prompts the arrival of the first woman, Pandora, and her jar of evils. Pandora is entirely absent from Prometheus Bound, and Prometheus becomes a human benefactor and divine king-maker, rather than an object of blame for human suffering.[3]

Prometheus Trilogy

There is evidence that Prometheus Bound was the first play in a trilogy conventionally called the Prometheia, but the other two plays, Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, survive only in fragments. In Prometheus Unbound, Heracles frees Prometheus from his chains and kills the eagle that had been sent daily to eat the Titan's perpetually regenerating liver. Perhaps foreshadowing his eventual reconciliation with Prometheus, we learn that Zeus has released the other Titans whom he imprisoned at the conclusion of the Titanomachy. In Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, the Titan finally warns Zeus not to lie with the sea nymph Thetis, for she is fated to give birth to a son greater than the father. Not wishing to be overthrown, Zeus would later marry Thetis off to the mortal Peleus; the product of that union will be Achilles, Greek hero of the Trojan War. Grateful for the warning, Zeus finally reconciles with Prometheus.

Debate over authenticity

Scholars at the Great Library of Alexandria unanimously deemed Aeschylus to be the author of Prometheus Bound. Since the 19th century, however, several scholars have doubted Aeschylus' authorship of the drama. These doubts initially took the form of the so-called "Zeus Problem," or the argument that the playwright who demonstrated such piety toward Zeus in The Suppliants and Agamemnon could not have been the same playwright who, in Prometheus Bound, inveighs against Zeus for violent tyranny. Some who object to this argument put forward the theory of a Zeus who (like the Furies in the Oresteia) "evolves" throughout the trilogy; these people argue that it is possible Zeus is meant to be reminiscent of a tyrant only in Prometheus Bound, and that in the conclusion of the full trilogy, Aeschylus' Zeus could have become more comparable with the just and honorable Zeus found in the works of Hesiod.[4]

Increasingly, arguments for and against the attribution to Aeschylus have been based on metrical-stylistic grounds: the play's diction, the use of so-called Eigenwoerter, the use of recitative anapests in the meter, etc.[5] Using such criteria in 1977, Mark Griffith made a case against the attribution.[6] C. J. Herington, however, repeatedly argued for it.[7] Since Griffith's landmark study, confidence in Aeschylean authorship has steadily eroded. Influential scholars such as M. L. West,[8] and Alan Sommerstein,[9] have made arguments against authenticity. West has argued that the Prometheus Bound and its trilogy are at least partially and probably wholly the work of Aeschylus' son, Euphorion, who was also a playwright. Those who trust in the verdict of antiquity and still favor Aeschylean authorship have dated the play anywhere from the 480s to 456 BC. The matter may never be settled to the satisfaction of all. As Griffith himself, who argues against authenticity, puts it: "We cannot hope for certainty one way or the other."[10]

The argument of Herington[11] and others for authenticity has largely centered upon the fact that Prometheus by Aeschylus was one play in a trilogy and therefore discussion of its isolated attribution are of limited import. Of all Aeschylus plays and tragedies, which have been numbered by some as approaching ninety plays during his own lifetime, only the Oresteia trilogy survives in the complete text of all three plays among the seven surviving plays by Aeschylus.

Reception and influence

Prometheus Bound enjoyed a measure of popularity in antiquity. Aeschylus was very popular in Athens decades after his death, as Aristophanes' The Frogs (405 BC) makes clear. Allusions to the play are evident in his The Birds of 414 BC, and in the tragedian Euripides' fragmentary Andromeda, dated to 412 BC. If Aeschylean authorship is assumed, then these allusions several decades after the play's first performance speak to the enduring popularity of Prometheus Bound. Moreover, a performance of the play itself (rather than a depiction of the generic myth) appears on fragments of a Greek vase dated c. 370–360 BC.[12]

In the early 19th century, the Romantic writers came to identify with the defiant Prometheus. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a poem on the theme, as did Lord Byron. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a play, Prometheus Unbound, which used some of the materials of the play as a vehicle for Shelley's own vision.

Performance of Prometheus Bound in the English language

Memorable lines

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ See "The Authencity Debate" section of this entry.
  2. ↑ http://www.theoi.com/Text/AeschylusPrometheus.html
  3. ↑ See, e.g., Lamberton 1988, 90-104.
  4. ↑ For a summary of the "Zeus Problem" and the theory of an evolving Zeus, see Conacher 1980.
  5. ↑ See, as examples, Griffith 1977, 157-72; Ireland 1977, 189-210; Hubbard 1991, 439-60.
  6. ↑ Griffith 1977. Cambridge.
  7. ↑ For example, Herington 1970.
  8. ↑ West 1990.
  9. ↑ Sommerstein 1996.
  10. ↑ Griffith 1983, 34.
  11. ↑ Herington, 1970.
  12. ↑ DeVries 1993, 517-23.

References

Translations

External links

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