Four for Prometheus Bound, which was excellent and chill-inducing on a level not felt in a long while. I am not sure I love Seth G. Benardete's translation style - choppy and grand. Introductions in this volume were stellar and hugely enriched my enjoyment of the plays, particularly the forewords for Prometheus Bound and The Persians.

Aeschylus' drama is evidently first in Greek tragedy, with its quality reduced by the constraints placed on plays. With only two characters in dialogue and high language, Aeschylus is harder to follow and enjoy. Nevertheless, the stories themselves are largely good. The Persians deals with the vice of hubris, but the story is very thin and the themes are not too complex. Similar with Seven Against Thebes, while missing the other two plays in the trilogy make it harder to judge, the depth only really materialises at the end. The Suppliants is too difficult to judge without the aid of the trilogy. The best of the four plays is certainly Prometheus Bound (which is worrying as we are not sure if Aeschylus wrote it), with a provokingly impious treatment of Zeus' justice. Again the greatest tragedy is that we don't have the sequels, nevertheless the play holds well on its own unlike the previous two.

I read this more for Prometheus Bound than anything else. I find the mythological archetype of the trickster interesting. Prometheus has obvious parallels with the Sumerian/Accadian deity Enki/Ea. There can hardly be any doubt that the tradition is a shared one between the Middle East and the Mediterranean. On top of that, the figure of Shemhazai (aka Samyaza) of the Enochic tradition is also somewhat analogous. Prometheus is said to have given man certain kinds of forbidden knowledge, e.g. the knowledge of fire and various arts and sciences, including medicine and magic. While Azazel was also credited with bringing to humanity forbidden knowledge, his predilection was apparently more geared towards war than towards civilization building. Shemhazai seemed to be more allied with knowledge that was meant to promote civilization. Another interesting parallel between Shemhazai and Prometheus is that both were made to do penance in their repsective traditions. In Prometheus' case, he was bound to some remote mountain where his liver was devoured by crows after it continuously regenerated. Shemhazai was said to have been suspended between heaven and earth. Apparently, in Enochic tradition, some constellation may have been equated with Shemhazai originally. Draco is an obvious candidate, given the following: It also is likely that the serpent in the garden is a related motif. It was a component of Sumerian myth that Enki was often symbolized by a serpent. That serpents and dragons were often conflated in Middle Eastern and Levantine mythology is ubiquitously evident. For some reason both were often associated with wisdom and knowledge. Azazel was said to have been cast into the rocky wilderness of Dudael. There may be some parallel there.

It's interesting that Aeschylus could put in the mouth of Prometheus a prophecy of Zeus' removal as head of the pantheon. It is clear that the average Greek didn't see Zeus as being omnipotent. It was understood that he became the head divinity after the removal of Chronos. It isn't made clear what tradition is behind this Promethean prophecy. Prometheus adamantly refuses to give details when Io inquires. However, there's an allusion to Typhon that seems to imply that Zeus will be overcome by Typhon eventually:

"I pity Typhon, that earth-born destroying giant,
The hundred-headed, native of the Cilician caves;
I saw him, all his fiery strength subdued by force.
Against the united gods he stood, his fearful jaws
Hissing forth terror; from his eyes a ghastly glare
Flashed, threatening to annihilate the throne of Zeus.
But Zeus's sleepless weapon came on him....
... and struck
His very heart, and burnt his strength to sulphurous ash.
...and thence one day
Rivers of flame shall burst forth, and with savage jaws
Devour the bright smooth fields of fertile Sicily;
Such rage shall Typhon, though charred with the bolt of Zeus,
Send boiling out in jets of fierce, fire-breathing spume
Unquenchable..."

The apocalyptic element of this prophecy seems to mirror the Norse legend of Ragnarok and Thor's final battle with the Midgard serpent. The parallels are certainly there.

The other three works included here are semi-historical dramas that are rather low on mythology, but contain some historical characters and allusions to historical events. Not quite as interesting for me, but worth reading nonetheless. There's not much there that I feel compelled to comment on.

The playwrights became excellent sources of myth when other primary sources were lost. Aeschylus is thus a primary source for the myth of Prometheus. If one is interested in Greek mythology, this is a great source.

I bought this book because we were going to see a production of the Persians and wanted to be familiar with the story. I did like it a lot. This translation seemed really good, you could really hear the beauty and the despair of the ancient words. It was interesting reading a play that was how terrible things were for the enemey. Were the Greeks boasting or just showing compassion? I enjoyed the Persians immensly, a lot of woe, a strong woman queen, and a ghost! My favourite things! The next play Seven against thebes I also found interesting. I liked the juxtaposition between the women seeking religious help from the gods and the men keen on war. While it read a lot like a modern action movie (with descriptions of battles) it was interesting to see the gender differences and the way religon was portrayed, and like the first play, the language was gorgeous. The supplicants was also very interesting from a gender perspective, as the women petitioned the gods, and the town to save them from unwanted marriage. I can totally see why people would want to study these plays in detail, just reading through I felt like I was missing so much, but still getting exposed to so much history it was great. The last play Prometheus Unbound wasn't as much fun. The translator said how it was possibly not written by Aeschylus. I think the fact that there were so many more charcters seemed a bit weaker, and I missed the woes of the female chorus in the other play. But it was still good, just not as good as the first three. I think I've read three Greek playwrights so far, and this is definitely my favourite. I also highly recommend this translation.

Not as good as the Oresteia, but still good
Ranking:
Prometheus Bound
Supplicant Maidens
Persians
Seven Against Thebes (it just doesn’t work well unperformed and modern, sorry)

This is a review of Prometheus Bound. Reviews of other plays in the same book are found elsewhere (see below)



Peter Paul Rubens


Prometheus, discoursing on his gifts to mankind:

... At first
Mindless, I gave them mind and reason. - What I say
Is not censure of mankind, but showing you
How all my gifts to them were guided by goodwill. -
In those days they had eyes, but sight was meaningless;
Heard sounds, but could not listen; all their length of life
They passed like shapes in dreams, confused and purposeless.
Of brick-built, sun-warmed houses, or of carpentry,
They had no notion; lived in holes, like swarms of ants,
Or deep in sunless caverns; knew no certain way
To mark off winter, or flowery spring, or fruitful summer;
Their every act was without knowledge, till I came.


This play was the first in a trilogy. The others, both lost, were Prometheus Unbound (in which Zeus presented his case for the justness of his punishment of Prometheus) and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer. The translator, Philip Vellacott, in his excellent introduction to the four plays, expresses the view that it is difficult to imagine what material was left to cover in the last play, though it's assumed that somehow a resolution of the cases made by Prometheus and Zeus in the first two plays was concocted.


- - - - - - - - - -



Set the play at the dawn of human existence, or perhaps at a time when Greek "civilization" was thought to have been no more than barbaric, with little use of man's mental faculties. In Greek mythology this was in the time of the Titans. (See below)

Edith Hamilton cautions us, "The Greeks did not believe the gods created the universe. It was the other way about: the universe created the gods. Before there were gods Heaven and Earth had been formed. They were the first parents. The Titans were their first children, and the gods were their grandchildren."

The Titans were sometimes called the Elder Gods, and were supreme in the universe for an untold amount of time. The most important was Cronos, who ruled over the other Titans until his son, Zeus, dethroned him and seized power.

There were other notable Titans: Ocean, the river that encircled the earth; his wife Tethys; Hyperion, the father of the sun, the moon, and the dawn; Mnemosyne, which means Memory; Themis (Justice); and Iapetus, important because of his two sons – Atlas, who bore the world on his shoulders, and Prometheus, who was the savior of mankind. (from Hamilton, Mythology)



So, Prometheus: the savior of mankind. Why did mankind need a savior? Where did men come from?

The human race was created in the time of the Titans. But, says Vellacott,

man was early recognized as a regrettable failure, and kept in a state of wretchedness and total subservience. Force ruled everything; reason and right were unknown. The Titans were a race of gigantic size and strength, and [at least in one version of the myth] no intelligence; until in one of them, Prometheus, emerged rational and moral qualities, ranging from cunning and ingenuity to a love of freedom and justice. The knowledge that the future lay with such intangible principles rather than with brute strength, was a secret possessed by Earth, who imparted it to her son Prometheus. This certainly set Prometheus at the side of Zeus, son of Cronos, in rebellion against his father and the older dynasty; and by Prometheus' help Zeus and the other 'Olympian' gods won the day and thenceforward ruled the universe.

But Prometheus was not only an immortal; he was also a son of Earth, and felt a natural sympathy with the earth's mortal inhabitants. The race which Zeus despised and planned to destroy, Prometheus saw as capable of infinite development. He stole fire from heaven and gave it to them; and he taught them the basic mental and manual skills. In so doing he frustrated Zeus's plan to create a more perfect race… What win our favor for Prometheus is largely the fact that he believed in, and wanted to help, the human race as it is, full of both noble achievement and pitiable squalor, honoring both goodness and wickedness… But though in this play the balance of feeling is in favor of Prometheus, even the sympathetic Chorus rebuke him for pride: and it is clear that Zeus's case has yet to be presented.

the play

Like the other plays in this volume, there are no jumps in time, or changes of setting. Prometheus is present on the stage throughout. The Chorus is present on the stage from the time they enter right up to the end. The other characters enter and leave the stage, presenting the minimal "scene change" that apparently was accepted in early Greek drama.

Here's a synopsis.


- It begins with Prometheus being dragged onto the stage by STRENTH and VIOLENCE (are these minor Titans? children of the Titans? I'm not sure. This may be an example of the fact that many of the relations between non-human beings in Greek mythology are notably ambiguous, even seemingly contradictory from one tale to another.)

At any rate, there really is some action on the stage to open the play. HEPHAESTUS, the god of Fire, follows these three onto the stage. He doesn't really want to be there, because he understands what he is supposed to do. His opening speech establishes Aeschylus' setting for the play:

For you two, Strength and Violence, the command of Zeus
Is now performed. You are released. But how can I
Find heart to lay hands on a god of my own race,
And cruelly clamp him to this better, bleak ravine?
And yet I must; heart or no heart, this I must do.
To slight what Zeus has spoken is a fearful thing.
[to PROMETHEUS] Son of sagacious Themis, god of mountainous thoughts,
With heart as sore as yours I now shall fasten you
In bands of bronze immovable to this desolate peak,
Where you will hear no voice, nor see a human form;
But scorched with the sun's flaming rays your skin will lose
Its bloom of freshness. Glad you will be to see the night
Cloaking the day with her dark spangled robe; and glad
Again when the sun's warmth scatters the frost at dawn.
Each changing hour will bring successive pain to rack
Your body; and no man yet born shall set you free.
Your kindness to the human race has earned you this.
A god who would not bow to the gods' anger – you,
Transgressing right, gave privileges to mortal men.
For that you shall keep watch upon this bitter rock,
Standing upright, unsleeping, never bowed in rest.
And many groans and cries of pain shall come from you,
All useless; for the heart of Zeus is hard to appease.
Power newly won is always harsh.

Hephaestus rivets each of the arms to the rock. He is then commanded by Strength to "drive straight through the chest with all the force you have/the unrelenting fang of the adamantine [unbreakable] wedge." Once this is done, the three leave Prometheus to his misery.

Prometheus cries out,

See with what outrage
Racked and tortured
I am to agonize
For a thousand years!
See this shameful prison
Invented for me
By the new master of the gods!
…
I know exactly every thing
That is to be; no torment will come unforeseen.
My appointed fate I must endure as best I can,
knowing the power of Necessity is irresistible.
Under such suffering, speech and silence are alike
Beyond me. For bestowing gifts upon mankind
I am harnessed in this torturing clamp. For I am he
Who hunted out the source of fire, and stole it, …
And fire has proved
For men a teacher in every art, their grand resource.
That was the sin for which I now pay the full price,
Bared to the winds of heaven, bound and crucified.
…

- The CHORUS now enters in a winged ship and speak to Prometheus at length. They leave the ship, and gather around Prometheus as OCEANUS arrives, seated on a winged four-footed creature. She insists that she feels great friendship toward him, and admonishes him to be less proud, in this new regime in which Zeus has achieved rule over the other gods.

- Next Io enters. This is the longest "scene" in the play. Io, the virgin daughter of the king of Argos, is a fellow victim, indirectly, of Zeus. When Zeus first saw her he desired her. His wife Hera became aware of the attraction before a union had been consummated, and took steps to prevent it by transforming Io into a cow, then set the giant Argus to watch over her. Zeus had Hermes kill Argus, but Hera responded to this by sending a gadfly to torment Io, driving her from place to place all over the known world.

The Chorus asks Io to tell her story, and as she does Prometheus recounts his personal knowledge of Io's travail, and even tells her what will befall her in the future before she finds salvation from the enmity of Hera and the lust of Zeus.

- Finally Prometheus is visited by the last character, Hermes, who has been sent on an errand by Zeus. It seems that Zeus has foreknowledge that a son of his will cause his downfall, and Zeus wants Prometheus to use his powers to reveal to him who the mother of this child will be.

Prometheus mocks Hermes, claiming that he will not share this knowledge with the god who is responsible for his torments. Hermes warns Prometheus, and the Chorus, who seem to defend him, that they'll be sorry for being so pig-headed. Once Hermes leaves, his warning about Zeus' thunder and lightning comes to pass, and Prometheus cries, "Now it is happening; threat gives place to performance. The earth rocks; thunder, echoing from the depth/Roars in answer; fiery lightnings twist and flash… The cataclysm advances visibly upon me, Sent by Zeus to make me afraid.

Oh Earth, my holy mother,
O sky, where sun and moon
Give light to all in turn,
You see how I am wronged!"



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Previous review: Americanah
Next review: Varieties of Disturbance
Older review: The Numbers Game

Previous library review: Seven Against Thebes Aeschylus
Next library review: The Suppliants Aeschylus.

Prometheus bound was great, I wish the rest of the trilogy hadn't been lost. Of the few Greek dramas I've read so far, either this or Oedipus Rex is my favorite.

I know The Suppliants was written decades before Oedipus at Colonus, but having read the latter first, and feeling it was much better, this play didn't have much to offer me.

Seven Against Thebes was better than the introduction let on, only it's a shame the true ending has been lost and we're left with nothing but a fanfiction as this great play's capstone.

The Persians felt a bit weak, probably because nothing happened in it; everything was told in retrospect. Perhaps the spectacle of costumes, stage setting, and music would improve it, but this isn't a great piece to be read. On the upside, it's slightly shorter than the prior three, and Darius' ghost was cool.

34. Aeschylus, 2 : The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
Penn Greek Drama Series edited by David R. Slavitt & Palmer Bovie
published: 1999
format: 205 page paperback
acquired: May 30
read: Jun 6-9
rating: 4 stars

Each play had a different translator:

The Persians (472 bce) - translated by David R. Slavitt
Seven Against Thebes (467 bce) - translated by Stephen Sandy
The Suppliants (463 bce) - translated by Gail Holst-Warhaft
Prometheus Bound: (date unknown, authorship contested) - translated by William Matthews

When I originally sat down to read some Greek tragedies, I started with this book, because Aeschylus's are the oldest surviving. At first I was struck by how curious the beginning of [The Persians] was. A prologue character opens the play and narrates the setting, talking directly to the audience. He opens, "The chorus of elders files in, the enemy we despise." Then goes on to describe these elders of the chorus and how we, the audience, will respond to them. When he called me a "New Yorker or Californian", I finally figured out something wasn't right. At this point I should have been terribly annoyed and hated the book.

These are "original literary translations". Slavitt was most free and creative in [The Persians]. There are no prologue characters in the Greek tragedies. Slavitt has essentially written his own play, one that tries to modernize the ancient one while maintaining the general theme. The other three plays are closer to simply translations. They translate freely, mixing, excising and adding parts, but they don't do anything as radical as add or subtract characters.

Anyway, the reason I didn't hate this book is that I actually enjoyed Slavitt's creation. Yes, it left me feeling I still needed to read more standard translations, and for a few plays I did this. But I gained something here too. This book was, for me, worth the detour.

I reviewed The Persians and The Seven Against Thebes on their pages. Some notes on the other two:

The Suppliants

50 brides, the Danaids, flee their Egyptian grooms. They travel oversea and land in Argos in Greece, where they camp on holy ground. They beg for protection from the gods and from the king of Argos, hence the supplication.

It's the first of a lost trilogy. Here the king of Argos agrees to protect them, just as the 50 rejected grooms arrive. In the next plays the king is killed and the sisters are married to the men. The first night of marriage, 49 sisters kill their new husbands. One holds out—Hypermnestra refuses to kill Lynceus. Lynceus eventually becomes king of Argos.

The Suppliants is odd in several ways. It's uneventful and kind of boring and yet also curious and interesting as the woman plead for protection by reasoning. They first argue they are in the right, then they threaten mass suicide on sacred ground of Argos, and act that would pollute this ground.

The translator, in her preface, thinks over the question of why this play was preserved when so many were lost. She calls it "a remote and haunting text, whose august stance is hard to comprehend".

Prometheus Bound

Easily the best of these four plays. There is a lot going on here. Prometheus is interesting. The basic story line is that he is chained to cliff by Zeus forever as punishment for giving man fire. Here he claims he gave man not only fire, but everything needed for civilization, including how to think, and how to use math and study the stars. He is visited by Oceanus who wishes to help him, and Io (as in Ionic) who is rushing through her own troubles. Hera turned her into a cow and has a fly endlessly harass her across the known world. Finally Hermes comes to press Prometheus on a secret he has about the fate of Zeus. The discussions are interesting and varied, touching on personal fate and on how much to sacrifice and what it all means.

This is another survivor of a lost trilogy. In Prometheus Unbound, Zeus would free Prometheus, who, in return, would warn Zeus not to marry Thetis. In Prometheus the Fire-Bringer Prometheus would finally convince Zeus not to marry Thetis. She is married to a human, and gives birth to the hero Achilles. I'll note that there is some debate on the author of Prometheus Bound, but I'll leave it there. (I'm not sure what "author" really meant to Greeks in this context anyway.)

Review to come... First two: Suppliants - boring; Persians - good. Last two: Seven Against - very good; Prometheus - incredible/shattering/vital.

Precious each one and delightful. How towering a monument, this Prometheus Bound.

Read directly after the relatively familiar Sophocles plays, which felt at times like the better parts of Shakespeare or Arrested Development, Aeschylus' drama applied itself to me in bold, even savage strokes. No wonder the young Nietzsche considered the soldier-turned-propagandist to have orchestrated tragedy's purest form - anything here resembling subtlety is bound in service to one or another unapologetic chauvinisms, any subversion of which is punished, catastrophically and unavoidably, by greater powers. The human position, the tragic position, is to walk into the gnashing jaws of fate. Pelasgus and Eteocles do so by placing themselves in harm's way. Xerxes flees his punishment and crumbles in humiliation. Throughout, the righteous noblesse of the lionised, masculinised Greek civilisation is contrasted with images of barbarian decadence. The Danaids are the only female (or indeed feminised) characters whose fear is transmuted to nobility - their preference for death over dishonour, as a sticking point, places them alongside the otherwise individual, "heroic", and definitely male tragic protagonists.

Prometheus Bound stands out, and the theory attributing its authorship to Aeschylus' own son, working from his father's notes, is appealing if only for the sense of teleological continuity it offers for the evolution of the tragic form. The matured, schizoid Nietzsche might be more compatible with this hero, whose challenges to the gods may actually promise to shake them from their pedestals, and whose noble suffering, though long and deep, comes yet with the certainty of vindication at the hands of his beneficiaries. The lines are blurred between the divine and the mortal. Glory is within reach, at least for some.

Once again, the OWC paperbacks deliver a wealth of supplementary material, including seventy-odd pages of introduction, and explanatory notes that match the play-texts themselves for volume. Alternating comfortably between two bookmarks remains a challenge, but as with operatic surtitles or anime subtitles, one learns to develop rhythms so as to integrate the stage-action and accompanying text into a cohesive, narrative experience.

After reading the contents of "Prometheus Bound" I can wholeheartedly recommend anyone read it. This play presents various different real-life and hypothetical dilemmas and important themes while being written almost 2,500 years ago. The play not only provides important dilemmas and themes to consider but also warns of tyrannical rule and presents a situational duality between free will and fate. With modern-day ties linked to protests and dictatorship, this cautionary tale remains relevant to this day. The characters are well-developed, especially Prometheus, whose defiance and suffering inspire sympathy and admiration. The dialogue is poetic and engaging, and the play's structure and pacing build towards a powerful climax. Overall, "Prometheus Bound" is a timeless classic that deserves its place in the canon of Western literature.