A very readable translation of 4 of Aeschylus' plays. The earliest extant Greek dramas that we have. Much less "action" here than in later Greek drama. Sophocles was just beginning to present plays in the last days of this playwright.
Allan Sommerstein chooses to present long declarations by main characters as blocks of prose, rather than in Greek tragedy's metre and feet. He is the translator, editor and commentator of the complete plays of Aeschylus in a scholarly edition for Harvard. This is a more readable, less scholarly, edition of that work, edited for the "amateur".
Great Notes, but little on textual anomalies. Further Reading could use an update.
The best part is at the end of each play he gives a synopsis of what we know of the other 3 plays in the 4 play presentation this play was part of that year. Including the existing bits and pieces of text for those other 3 plays that have been found.
He often references commentary by the early mythologists (and Hesiod is referred to often), but the British version of annotation is a bit quirky for those of us in the US (last name of editor/author and year of publication only). But filling in that background information from early sources for the reader is very helpful.
His cries of amazement and horror by the characters are great - as he says, they are next to impossible to translate.
And at one point he runs down the 13 generations between Io and Heracles - which makes me feel not so bad when I can't remember who is related to whom in all of the Greek tragedies that we have available to us to this day.
Readable, useful, informative edition. Read along side the Deborah Roberts' Hackett translation, which is a bit more scholarly in its Intro and textual commentary.
5 out of 5.

DrAAAA-Maaaaa!!!!

An ancient classic that seems like it shouldn't work but is done so well it does. Technically speaking not much happens in the play. Besides a little scene setting most of the play is just Prometheus telling his story and others listening and reacting to what he says. There isn't much movement just a lot of talking. That should make this a pretty boring piece but the story that Prometheus tells is so riveting that the piece feels very action packed, regardless of the complete loss of actual action.

It is theorized that Prometheus Bound is really only the first installment in a trilogy and, except for a few scraps, the next two entries in the series are lost. That is really too bad because, even though mythology tells us how the story ends, I would still have loved to have read the whole series

Two excellent plays (Prometheus Bound & Seven Against Thebes), full of darkness and apocalyptic drama, and two pretty boring pageant masques.

Prometheus dared, and suffered for it, and therefore his story speaks to every single person who has dared and suffered. The Athenian playwright Aeschylus told well the story of Prometheus’ transgression and torment back around 430 B.C.; and as this Penguin Books edition of four of Aeschylus’ plays demonstrates, the same themes that predominate in Prometheus Bound can also be found in other Aeschylean plays such as The Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, and The Persians.

Prometheus Bound starts off on a grim note, and only gets grimmer from there. As the play begins, the Titan Prometheus, who has defied the will of Zeus by stealing fire from heaven and giving it to humankind, is being bound to a rocky mountaintop near the sea. A sympathetically depicted Hephaestus, god of the forge, is notably reluctant to chain Prometheus to the mountain – “how can I/Find heart to lay hands on a god of my own race,/And cruelly clamp him to this bitter, bleak ravine?” (pp. 20-21) – but feels that he cannot defy the will of Zeus.

Bound to his rock, knowing that he will be condemned to unending torture, Prometheus states that his reason for giving fire to humans was not simply to raise them from the level of the other animals. Rather, he says that Zeus “Of wretched humans…took no account, resolved/To annihilate them and create another race”, and claims that “This purpose there was no one to oppose but I:/I dared. I saved the human race from being ground/To dust, from total death” (p. 27). Some modern readers might see a parallel between Prometheus’ story and the Biblical account of Christ’s enduring the torments of the Crucifixion in order to save humankind from being lost to sin. Others, who have seen Ridley Scott’s science-fiction film Prometheus (2012), will no doubt recall the revealing words of the android David: “Sometimes, to create, one must first destroy.”

Yet Prometheus holds a sort of trump card; he knows the identity of the woman who is fated to bear a son greater than his father – whose offspring could, theoretically, dethrone Zeus himself, if Zeus pursues a liaison with her. A cold and unsympathetic messenger-god Hermes demands that Prometheus reveal the identity of this woman – “The Father bids you tell him what this marriage is/Through which you boast that he shall fall from power” (p. 48) – and adds that Prometheus’ punishment, if he fails to submit to Zeus’ command, will include having his liver gnawed every day by an eagle. The Chorus, which usually in Greek drama expresses the likely sensibility of the audience, urges Prometheus to relent: “To us it seems that Hermes’ words are sensible./He bids you quit resistance and seek good advice./Do so; a wise man’s folly forfeits dignity” (p. 51). Yet Prometheus is unmoved, and the play ends with him crying out against his torment.

Prometheus Bound was the first play of a trilogy; the other two plays in the trilogy, Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, are lost. But if the dramatic trajectory of this trilogy was anything like what one sees in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, then perhaps these plays showed Prometheus softening his pride and Zeus moderating his wrath – a scenario in which, while humans need to learn to serve the gods faithfully, so the gods must learn to rule justly.

Certainly Prometheus has a major and enduring role in our culture – not just the film Prometheus, cited above, but also examples as varied as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), bearing as it does the subtitle The Modern Prometheus; Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820), which gives Shelley’s Romanticism-inflected version of the events following Aeschylus’ play; and even the Prometheus statue that dominates the lower plaza at New York’s Rockefeller Center, where the fire-bringing Titan is made to symbolize New York’s enduring spirit of commerce and enterprise. I suppose it is for the best that sculptor Paul Manship didn’t show Prometheus bound to the rock, with the liver-gnawing eagle and all that – would have sent the wrong message.

The suppliants of Aeschylus’ The Suppliants are 50 women – the “Danaids” or daughters of Danaus, whose brother, the Egyptian king Aegyptus has 50 sons. Aegyptus believes that it would be a simply perfect arrangement if all of Danaus’ daughters married all of Aegyptus’ sons – 50 brides for 50 brothers – but the Danaids are having none of it. Therefore they have left their Egyptian homeland and taken refuge on Greece’s Peloponnesian coast, saying, “Exile is our choice,/Our hope of escape from lust of men,/From abhorred and impious union with Aegyptus’ sons” (p. 54). The Argive king Pelasgus is skeptical at first regarding their request for political asylum in Argos, stating that “Marriage within the family gives increase of strength” (p. 64); evidently, it doesn’t much bother him if cousins marry. Yet Pelasgus faces a dreadful dilemma: if he shelters the Danaids, the Egyptians will make war upon him; if he rejects the Danaids, he will violate the obligation of every Greek king to shelter the suppliant. And an arrogant Egyptian herald, arriving on the Peloponnesian coast, makes all too clear his readiness to drag the Danaids – by the hair, if necessary – back into the slavery of marriage to the Aegyptids.

The play ends on a note of cautious hope for the Danaids; but the true shape of things to come may be seen in the words of a second chorus, a chorus of maids who counsel restraint and reverence for the will of the gods: “[Y]ou, it seems, would alter the unalterable….[I]n your prayers use restraint….Towards the gods – never be uncompromising” (p. 85). In the remaining plays of the tetralogy that The Suppliants begins, perhaps Aeschylus spun out the rest of the story: the Danaids’ forced marriage to the Aegyptids, their wedding-night murders of their husbands, and their punishment in Tartarus – forever carrying water in perforated buckets, to fill a tub that will never be filled.

The Seven Against Thebes invokes a mythological scenario that will be familiar to readers of Sophocles’ Antigone -- a civil war between Oedipus’ sons Eteocles and Polyneices. Greek viewers of Aeschylus’ time would have known well the story of how the two brothers are supposed to rule Thebes jointly; but Eteocles seizes sole power for himself, and in response Polyneices raises a mercenary army of Argive soldiers to lay siege to Thebes, with one Argive captain stationing himself outside each of Thebes’ seven gates – hence, the Seven Against Thebes. Eteocles commands elite Theban officers to defend the gates, and goes forth to lead the defense himself.

The scenario creates an ethical double-bind. Does one support the king who rules unjustly? Or does one follow the rebel who threatens to bring all the horrors of civil war to the city he wants to rule – who will, in effect, destroy Thebes in order to save it?

Eteocles possesses the arrogance characteristic of many of the tragic heroes of classical Greek drama, confidently asserting that the Theban people need “Never fear this horde of foreigners!/God will give victory” (p. 89). A chorus of Theban women meanwhile express their anxiety regarding the coming conflict, and pray to the gods for relief for the fate that awaits them if Polyneices’ rebel army prevails: “Come, all you gods who guard our country;/See us, threatened with slavery, joining in supplication” (p. 91).

The result of the battle is an eloquent denunciation of the horrors of civil war. All of the Seven Against Thebes are killed; so are the Theban captains who defended the city against them. Worse yet, the two brothers Eteocles and Polyneices have killed each other. Antigone and Ismene, sisters of Eteocles and Polyneices, come together to mourn over their dead brothers. As in Sophocles’ Antigone, it is ordained that Eteocles will receive honourable burial, while the body of the rebel Polyneices will be exposed to the elements; and Antigone boldly announces her intent of giving her brother Polyneices a dignified burial, come what may. The play ends on a note of division, with half of the chorus following the funeral procession of each of the dead brothers.

The Persians differs from the other plays in this collection, in that it draws from history rather than mythology for its source material. The tragic protagonist here is Xerxes, king of Persia; the time is sometime in 480 or 479 B.C., not long after the Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis destroyed Xerxes’ dreams of conquering the Greek city-states and incorporating them into the Persian Empire. When The Persians premiered in 472 B.C., the Greeks’ victory at Salamis was just eight years in the past – rather as if a playwright today, in 2017, wrote a play dramatizing a major 2009 event.

Standing at the tomb of Xerxes’ predecessor Darius, a Chorus of Persian councilors waits anxiously for the return of Xerxes, wondering what the result of the Persian expedition against Greece may have been. They are joined in front of the Persian royal palace at Susa by Xerxes’ mother Atossa, who expresses her own sense of dread “That our vast wealth may in its rash course overturn/That fair peace which Darius built with heaven’s help” (p. 127).

Atossa sees in a dream the destruction of the Persian forces at Salamis; and when the ghost of Darius arises, King Hamlet-like, from his tomb, having sensed disquiet in his former kingdom, Atossa must tell him the bad news of Xerxes’ defeat. The Persian Darius sounds very Greek when he bemoans how “my son, in youthful recklessness,/Not knowing the gods’ ways, has been the cause of all” (p. 143). That theme of impious pride being thrown down by divine will is reinforced when Xerxes himself enters, in rags, describes his defeat, and denounces himself as “A loathed and piteous outcast,/Born to destroy my race” (p. 148). Did the original Athenians watching this play feel sympathy for Xerxes in his downfall? Did they look at this play as an opportunity to do a bit of an “end-zone dance” over their defeated Persian enemy? Or were there elements of both?

With helpful commentary and notes from the distinguished translator Philip Vellacott, this Penguin Books edition of Prometheus Bound and Other Plays provides a fine and strong introduction to these works by the first of Athens’ great dramatists.

n  Prometheus Boundn: I really enjoyed being thrown back to high school and remembering Io the cow and all the crazy stories of the Greek gods. In this short play, Prometheus, who gave humans the gift of fire, is condemned to being chained to a mountain for having done so because Zeus doesn't approve. Io shows up and her reveals to her that she still has a long way before she will eventually conceive a child from Zeus.

n  The Suppliantsn: In this one the fifty daughters of Danaus (some descendant of Zeus and Io) are running away from their fifty cousins who want to bed them.

"Let them die before they ever lay hands
On us their cousins, to enter our unwilling beds,
Which Right forbids them!"

At least they understand how it works and know that bedding cousins is probably a BAD idea. This is putting Oedipus to serious shame. ;)
The whole play is pretty much about the ladies moaning and imploring the gods and the King of Argos, whom they chance upon and implore to help them. It was pretty crazy, but what would you expect from descendants of Zeus and a cow?

"The child pastured amid flowers,
The Calf whom Zeus begot
Of the Cow, mother of our race,
Made pregnant by the breathing and caress of Zeus"

n  Seven Against Thebesn: This one was my favourite and a sort of prologue to Antigone, it tells the story of how the two brothers came to kill each other. For some reason the end made me laugh.

"Antigone: For you who died.
Ismene: For you who killed.
Antigone: My heart is wild with sobs.
Ismene: My soul groans in my body.
Antigone: Brother, whom I weep for -
Ismene: Brother, most pitiable -
Antigone: You were killed by your brother.
Ismene: You killed your brother.
Antigone: Twofold sorry to tell of -
Ismene: Twofold sorrow to see -
Antigone: Sorrow at the side of sorrow!
Ismene: Sorrow brother to sorrow!"

It's not even funny, but late at night it was.

n  The Persiansn: My least favourite, about the account of the battle of Salamis and the victory of the Athenians over Xerxes' army, and the latter's curse. It was good but less engaging than the rest.

It seems humans have been concerned with the same whys and hows for thousands of years, and it brings an odd sense of comfort whenever I read ancient work such as these four plays attributed to Aeschylus, and discover the same inquiries into human nature that still haunt us today, before the realization that this will go on until we cease to exist dawns. In the first of these four plays, Prometheus Bound, Prometheus who was an ally to Zeus as he overthrew Kronus and the Titans has turned against him and punishes him for helping humans, who Zeus was bent on destroying, with the gift of fire, taught them the crafts they needed, and gave them blind hope. And so for this he is chained to a rock, reduced and shamed, and exposed to the elements where he laments his condition. In this play, the dynamics of power and the brute force of tyranny are explored to its climatic end. In the second play, The Suppliants, the Danaids who are a chorus of fifty girls, flee Egypt to Argos to escape forced marriage and ask refuge of the king Pelasgus. The third and forth plays, Seven Against Thebes and The Persians, are primarily war plays where the different characters, Eteocles and Xerxes meet their differing bitter fates, due to their pride and their need to prove themselves. What seems to tie these plays together is inescapable, inevitable fate. Those under power, mostly of the gods, are helpless to the fate that's been assigned to them and eventually all they can do is endure it. An interesting point I gathered while reading these plays is the effort taken to understand the other, the foreigner, the stranger (and where oppressing the stranger is seen as grievous a sin as forgetting the gods), whether they're Egyptian or Persian or from Thebes, and despite the cultural and physical differences. Sure, there's still nationalistic undertones as is the case with a play like The Persians, the Persians having been foes the Greeks fought against, Aeschylus himself having been involved in the war against them, but still an amazing inquiry into what being human is regardless of the origin of the human.

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

The four plays (Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes and The Persians) are 2,500 year-old classics covering interesting elements of Greek mytho-history. The introduction serves to contextualise well, hinting at the strong presence of women as a thread through the plays; divine expectation, capriciousness and punishment are also themes that spring from the source material.

I'm familiar with Vellacott's translations, primarily his work on Euripedes and thought they were excellent. I found this translation somewhat wooden and did struggle to keep interested at points (Seven Against Thebes was a particular moment). So at times I cross-referenced against the Greek text online and did my own translation of some paragraphs which gave me a renewed appreciation for Vellacott's lyrical work here. I think any problems with flow are down to the source material: fragmented pages (some having not survived the trials of time) and Aeschylus's style.

I do feel that the text is light on annotation. There are some few translation endnotes but they're arbitrarily given and plenty in the text remains unexplained.

This probably remains the standard entry point for these plays.

Kun lukee antiikin kreikkalaisia näytelmiä. on hyvä tuntea aihetta etukäteen. Totta kai monista on kasvanut suuria perustarinoita, joiden nimet elävät edelleen, kuten Oidipus, Sisyfos, Prometheus ja niin edelleen. Prometheus itse asiassa oli syy, miksi luin tämän kokoelman. En löytänyt siitä suomeksi omaa julkaisua, joten luettiin nyt kerralla neljä antiikin tragediaa. Näissä on tietysti hyvä tiedostaa, että varsinaisia tapahtumia ei ole, kaikki kerrotaan esiintymislavalla yhdeltä toiselle ja vielä runomuodossa, joten aina tällainen tavallinen kaduntallaaja ei ole täysin perillä, mistä on kyse. Kannattaa siis käyttää esimerkiksi nettiä saadakseen lisävalaistusta. Joka tapauksessa jälleen kerran veri virtaa valtoimenaan ja naiset ovat lähinnä vaihdon välineitä. Jumalat eivät juurikaan piittaa kuolevaisista, paitsi Prometheus ja hän saikin maksaa siitä karvaasti. Jos kiinnostaa länsimaisen kulttuurin ja kirjallisuuden alku, huonomminkin voisi lukemisensa valita.

“For them the height of evil waits implacable to pay them back in suffering for pride and godlessness.”

Sublime. Nearly 2500 years ago, Aeschylus was examining questions that still haunt us: the cost of war; the duty to shelter refugees even at the cost of peace; savagery vs. justice; and the nature of the universe - who determines Fate? Can even the gods escape it?

My favorite in this volume and of all the plays is “Prometheus Bound”, followed closely by “Agamemnon” from the first volume. All are worth reading, though, and watching, if we should be so lucky as to ever have the opportunity to see a performance.

“Nothing is sweeter than life lived, as long as this may be, always to hope and feast, keep the heart while it throbs alive, lit up with happiness.”

The god Prometheus, who in defiance of Zeus has saved mankind and given them fire, is chained to a remote crag as a punishment ordered by the king of the gods. Despite his isolation Prometheus is visited by the ancient god Oceanus, by a chorus of Oceanus’ daughters, by the “cow-headed” Io (another victim of Zeus), and finally by the god Hermes, who vainly demands from Prometheus his knowledge of a secret that could threaten Zeus’s power. After refusing to reveal his secret, Prometheus is cast into the underworld for further torture. The drama of the play lies in the clash between the irresistible power of Zeus and the immovable will of Prometheus, who has been rendered still more stubborn by Io’s misfortunes at the hands of Zeus. The most striking and controversial aspect of the play is its depiction of Zeus as a tyrant. Prometheus himself has proved to be for later ages an archetypal figure of defiance against tyrannical power.

I’ve just read Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. This sounds like an action movie, but in fact it is nothing of the sort. None of the fighting occurs on stage. It is a character study.
Eteocles is the perfect prince. He organises the defence of Thebes with courage and efficiency, and goes to his death Nelson-like, with his duty done and victory achieved.