Aeschylus: ‘Prometheus Bound’

 “Prometheus Bound” is without a doubt the greatest play that opens with a crucifixion.

Prometheus, a god taken down by a stronger god, is being nailed and chained to a boulder. He is being punished by Zeus for befriending humans. Zeus had planned to exterminate humanity and try something else.

And so Cratos (Might) and the unspeaking Bia (Violence) supervise Hephaistos, who is apologetic but has to do the dirty work of fastening Prometheus to the rock.

It would be a risky thing for a dramatist to do now — immobilizing the hero in the first scene. It’s also hard to image a contemporary playwright introducing the hero and not allowing him to speak through the opening scene, but that’s what Aeschylus does. Hephaistos, the smith god, hammers away, hating what he’s doing, while Cratos explains how Prometheus got into such a spot. Prometheus, contemptuous, refuses to talk to either one of them.

It’s an odd opening gambit for a dramatist. But this is Old Tragedy, and as Professor H.D.F. Kitto puts it, the drama is in the emotion, not in the events.

 

The real dramatic movement here is one which takes place in the mind of the immovable Prometheus, and Aeschylus’ presentation of this is one of the greatest achievements of the Greek stage.

 

Kitto says the play has two themes:

• Zeus’ tyrannical cruelty and Prometheus’ resistance to it.

• Long-range hope, the basis of which is a secret that Prometheus knows and Zeus doesn’t.

The Chorus of Oceanus’ daughters, who are kind of like mermaids, comes to console Prometheus, and then Oceanus himself arrives, riding on a hippocampus. (Imagine a sea monster: half horse, half fish.)

Oceanus is a Greek cousin of Job’s friends. He argues that it’s best to learn from your misfortune and seek to appease, rather resist, stronger forces. Resistance only invites more torture, more cruelty, more heartbreak.

Finally Io, the cow-horned maid, wanders in, wondering where she is. She, too, has been wronged by Zeus, turned into a heifer by the lusty god and pursued by a gadfly sent by the god’s jealous wife.

Prometheus alludes to the secret throughout the play. But he shares it clearly with a fellow victim: Tyrants fall.

In myth and in this play, Prometheus can see farther than anyone. He knows the day will come when Zeus will need his help. But Aeschylus was writing in a day when tyrants had fallen all over Greece. Peisistratos was an ugly memory in Athens.

Kitto reminds us that the Greeks had a primitive conception that Necessity was stronger than the gods. It’s almost a natural law. Tyrants are cruel and abuse people. They hate their enemies, of course, but they can never trust their friends. Inevitably, their greatest suspicions focus on those closest to them, those helping them hold on to power, the enablers who prop up the regime.

Such is the foundation of tyrannies. And with such a foundation, it’s only a matter of time.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on “Prometheus Bound” is on pages 57-67. The quotation is on p. 60.

“Prometheus Bound,” translated by David Grene, is in Aeschylus II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 132-79.