I am reviewing this as Prometheus Bound only
In the past year or so I have attempted to read through a few of Aeschylus' works though have struggled finishing any of them, this being the first, I think the idea of watching Prometheus suffer on a rock is interesting but I regret to say it doesn't hold the same appeal of the works of Euripides or Sophocles to me personally.
I will say that the setting lends very well to the fact that it is a play and it the first footnote is correct then it makes for a very compelling conversation in that regard.
Prometheus is a very cool guy, but in this he just seems like a cocky man who can't be wrong due to him falsifying his story to the chorus and whining to Io.
I will say that Aeschylus thrives on arguments with the climactic debate/argument between Hermes and Prometheus is especially well written
Despite the negativity of this review, maybe on a second reading I might feel a little different and more willing to enjoy Aeschylus play.

Tempi di rilettura.

Prometeo incatenato e I sette contro Tebe.

Tanta tanta roba.

Read Prometheus Bound on 30 Jan 15.

Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Three Stars

I definitely preferred Prometheus Bound and The Persians to the other plays in this collection. Divine intervention is always more interesting for me, but even the plays I didn't like so much were still written very well. There's a level of eloquence classical writers are known for that you really don't find these days, and I think Aeschylus demonstrates this perfectly. I'm definitely enjoying studying this over some of the other texts, and I think it's a good way to go into classical plays if you're at al interested but slightly daunted by the idea.

i do enjoy the story of prometheus and i was very glad that we are discussing this in class, however prometheus is a pick me man who should learn to shut up because he is annoying!!!

book 1 for my drama and transgression: from prometheus to faust module

See four plays are all really fragments as they portions of larger cycles dealing the same characters or themes. Imagine sitting down to read Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and having only Volume 3 available. Or only being able to watch Attack of the Clones but knowing five other Star Wars films once existed. Frustrating. Like the lost plays of William Shakespeare, the plays contained in this slim volume only tease us with what the completed stories might have authored. These are good examples of dissecting the human condition, but they only hint at what the author may have truly had in mind in telling them.

Two of the four stood out for me.
Prometheus Unbound is an interesting fraction (?) of a larger play, the rest of the pieces have been sadly lost, but it still works well on its own. Prometheus is the prototype rebel against authority, but he is also the prototype of the teacher. This makes him a very fascinating character study. In this play we see the results of his struggles against Zeus's authority and the consequences of his delivery of fire into the hands of mankind. It's a pity the other two (?) plays detailing the Prometheus chronicle by Aeschylus have been lost.

The Persians was also very interesting. A tagedy written by a Greek but from the point of view of a Persian who wanted to enslave the Greeks. Not what I expected.one would think that a historical tragedy would portray the Persians as monsters, villains and the stereotypical political enemy. Instead the Persians are humanely noble; which, of course, make sthe tragedy work. It was also interesting that this was a historical tragedy, most (all?) Greek plays I am familiar with deal with mythological stories and characters. This is in many ways a very unique example of Greek theater.

This collection of plays contains 4 out of 7 of Aeschylus' surviving plays: Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes and The Persians. Of these I preferred Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes over the other two, though they are all very good plays and are worth reading for anyone interested in Ancient Greece.

As theater goes I have read nothing of higher caliber than this. Prometheus Bound especially stirs great emotion in the reader and would be amazing to see live. The conversations with the Ocean, the nature of the gods, mans relation to fire. It is all very poetic and lovely. It was a sheer pleasure to read these works of Aeschylus.

I absolutely loved Seven Against Thebes. There is so much going on - curses, justice, war, brother against brother, honor, fear, death.

Prometheus Bound is the story of Prometheus blessing mankind with fire and hope. He pays a dear price for doing so.

The Suppliants asks the question of what will win in the end - Ares (force) or the Aeropagus (words, law, justice).

The Persians was an interesting play knowing that Aeschylus took part in the Persian Wars. This imagining of what took place at the Persian court upon the epic loss in the war must have made for some self-righteous feel good for the Greek audience.

Before moving onto the plays I will comment a bit on this edition. The translations are very readable. I'm not qualified to comment on their accuracy, but the poetry of them seems good. The introduction is ho hum and I could have used a bit more information here. It is also written in microscopic type. That's not unusual in a Penguin Classic, but when the volume is so slight I wish they could have avoided eye strain.

Aeschylus is the worst of the surviving Greek playwrights. He's not a bad playwright, and Prometheus Bound is a great play, but he's almost most interesting as the birthing of Drama rather than for the drama itself. He's a good, perhaps great poet, but the plays here are not as good as the Oresteia and the Oresteia is consistently worse than anything else by Greek playwrights that I have read. The great exception to that is Prometheus Bound which is absolutely awesome. Prometheus Bound may not be by Aeschylus, but is conventionally ascribed to him. It's truly a great play with a compelling hero and it feels very modern and directly relevant to now as all great plays do. It is simply in a different class than the rest. I thought of rating this volume as five stars because of Prometheus Bound alone. Which is one of the great plays, but the rest of it, while very pretty and interesting historically, lacks many of the basics of good drama, like plot and character which were still in development at this time. I suppose everyone should read this for the birth of drama, but both Sophocles and Euripides reached greater heights (again with the exception of Prometheus Bound which is a great work).

shorts

Four Quick short plays. I envision a small acting troop performing these in a park or busy city center. All taken from Greek myth with long dialogues.

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.


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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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