In late antiquity and the Middle Ages Prometheus Bound was the most read of the Aeschylean plays, and in subsequent centuries it has remained among the most popular; in particular, its portrayal of a god who endures potentially unending torment, for the sake of humanity, from the agents of a tyrannical Zeus, appealed very powerfully to thinkers, authors and artists of the Revolutionary and Romantic periods, notably Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Marx and Nietzsche.1 From the mid-nineteenth century, however, doubts began to appear about whether the play was in fact his work. Some of these rested on the inadequate basis of supposed inconsistencies between the theology of this play and that of the rest of the Aeschylean corpus, but increasingly attention has been drawn to important features of style and technique in which Prometheus Bound (as well as its evident sequel, Prometheus Unbound2) differ markedly from the undisputed plays of Aeschylus, and to possible echoes of other texts that were not composed until after his death. The issue remains in dispute, and the play’s authenticity continues to find powerful defenders, not least because it was never questioned in antiquity; but at present it would probably be true to say that a majority of scholars would regard it as being by a slightly later hand.3 Martin West’s suggestion4 that the hand is that of Aeschylus’ son Euphorion, passing his own work off as that of his father, is a very tempting one, not least because it gives full value to the play’s audacious grandeur of concept, reminiscent of that of the Oresteia and quite unlike anything found in Sophocles or Euripides, which surely suggests Aeschylean inspiration even if the detailed technique may not suggest Aeschylean workmanship.
We have no direct information about when the play was produced. Whether by Aeschylus or not, it can hardly be earlier than The Suppliants, to which it contains (at line 857) a clear reference; and it cannot be later than about 430, since in (probably) 429 its sequel Prometheus Unbound was imitated or parodied in a comedy by Cratinus. It may be significant that Euphorion won first prize at the City Dionysia of 431, defeating both Sophocles and Euripides.5
The story of how Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to men, and was cruelly punished by the supreme god but ultimately released by Heracles, had been told by Hesiod (Theogony 507–616), who combined it with the story of the creation of the first woman. Our play ignores this latter myth6 and instead forges links between the Prometheus/fire story and the great narrative of the successive generations of the gods7 – how Zeus overthrew his father, Cronus, and how he was himself at risk of being overthrown by a son of his if he did not take great care in choosing mothers for his children. In the Theogony (507–10) he is a son of Iapetus, Cronus’ brother; in our play he is upgraded to be himself at least a half-brother of Cronus, a son of Gaea (Earth) (209–10) who is in turn identified with the prophetic goddess Themis (ibid.; cf. 18). And Themis is able to give Prometheus knowledge – foreknowledge, enabling him to live up to the meaning of his name – of crucial developments in the history of the divine world. She tells him that victory in the war between the generations of gods will go to craft, not to force (209–13), thus enabling him, god of craft as he is, to offer his services to both sides, with only the younger gods accepting them. She, presumably, it also is who tells him8 the secret which, if he can only keep it safe, gives him ultimate power even over Zeus: the identity of the female who is destined to bear a son mightier than his father, and with whom, therefore, Zeus cannot mate without sealing his own doom. The audience probably know, as soon as they hear the prophecy, that Thetis is meant – and therefore how the confrontation between Prometheus and Zeus will eventually end;9 Prometheus knows too, of course, but Zeus does not. In the latter part of the play, Prometheus proclaims the coming fall of Zeus more and more loudly, but nothing will make him reveal who the fatal female is; and his punishment and pain, already greater than anything a mortal can even imagine, is increased even further. He is told that (as in Hesiod10) Zeus’ eagle will come to gnaw at his liver, but only after he has been thrust beneath the earth to remain in darkness for a long period.11 With the implementation of this first part of his intensified punishment, Prometheus Bound ends.
The extremely hostile presentation of Zeus in this play has often been thought amazing in its audacity, and has been a significant factor in the play’s appeal to revolutionary and iconoclastic minds. Three things should be remembered. Firstly, Greeks were under no obligation to believe that their gods were good; indeed, Greek myth and poetry were severely criticized by Plato and others for precisely this reason.12 Secondly, the idea that Zeus in particular was spitefully hostile to mortals for no good reason was one that was enshrined in the poems of the revered Hesiod: in Hesiod’s version of the Prometheus story itself (Theogony 535–612; compare Works and Days 42– 10513), when Prometheus deceives Zeus over the division of sacrificial meats, Zeus punishes not Prometheus but humanity, by denying them fire, and then when Prometheus steals fire and gives it to men, Zeus punishes them again by creating the first woman. Thirdly, Prometheus Bound is only the first part of the drama. Emphasis is laid on the newness of Zeus’ rule,14 and we are reminded that ‘everyone is harsh when new to power’ (35); but already there are foreshadowings of a future mellowing in Prometheus’ prediction of Io’s fate (848–9) and of an eventual friendly reconciliation between Zeus and himself (190–92). We know enough about Prometheus Unbound to be sure that this indeed happened;15 and we also know that almost the first event in that play was the entry of a Chorus of Titans – whom therefore Zeus must have released from the depths of Tartarus, where they were confined at the time of Prometheus’ binding (219–21). This apparent development in the character of Zeus between earlier and later stages of a story is not unique to the Prometheus plays: it is also found in the Oresteia, where Zeus at first, with the Furies as his agents, implacably enforces a model of retributive justice under which crime can be punished only by the victim’s kin and only by the commission of a further (and usually a worse) crime, and then, against the fierce opposition of the Furies, protects Orestes from automatic retribution (acting through Apollo) and establishes (acting through Athena) a new model of justice in which guilt is judged and punishment administered by a neutral third party (the judicial organs of the polis).16 The hostile presentation of Zeus in Prometheus Bound may be unusually sustained, but it is not an inexplicable anomaly.
Prometheus Bound is a play of startling spectacle, whose realization has often been thought to stretch the resources of the Athenian theatre. According to the text, Prometheus is bound to the windswept upper part of a high cliff, overlooking a deep ravine.17 It is highly likely that the cliff, as in Sophocles’ Philoctetes or Aristophanes’ Birds, is represented by the skene (while the orchestra represents the floor of the ravine), and that Prometheus, like a felon being executed by apotympanismos,18 will be shown suspended in his bonds, his feet not touching the stage platform. If he is bound to a board resting on the skene door (which is never used during the play itself), then at the very end he can be made, by the sudden opening of the door, to fall into the dark interior of the skene – and, in imagination, of the earth.19
The Chorus and their father, Oceanus, both arrive by an aerial method of transport – or at any rate Prometheus, before the arrival of the Chorus, hears a ‘rustling sound of birds’ and the ‘light beating of wings’ (123–5), while the Chorus say they have come ‘on swift, striving wings’, sped by ‘the swift breezes… in a winged car’ (128–35), They later speak of leaving ‘this swift-moving car and the pure upper air, the pathway of birds’ (278–80), and Oceanus actually points to the ‘swift-winged bird’ he has guided to the scene (286–7; cf. 394–5) and perhaps never dismounts from it.20 It seems most likely that the Chorus are first seen, in a vehicle or vehicles, on the roof of the skene,21 from which they descend, out of sight, between 283 and 396,22 from which point they take their normal position in the orchestra; while Oceanus’ entrance and exit are a clear case for the use of the flying-machine (mechane). With the central character totally immobilized for almost the entire duration of the play,23 and with all but one of the dramatis personae being gods,24 this is arguably the most abnormal Greek drama that we possess.
1. For a review of the reception of this play in ancient, medieval and modern times, see A. J. Podlecki, Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound (Oxford 2005), pp. 41–68.
2. On Prometheus Unbound, see pages 199–203 below. Prometheus the Fire-Bearer, a title cited in various ancient and medieval sources and often thought since to have been that of the first or third play of a Prometheus trilogy, is more likely to be an alternative (and preferable) title for the satyr drama about Prometheus produced together with The Persians in 472 (see pp. 52–4 above).
3. The linguistic, metrical and other technical arguments against the play’s authenticity are fully set out by Mark Griffith, The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound (Cambridge 1977); see also M. L. West, Journal of Hellenic Studies 99 (1979), pp. 130–48 (reprinted with a postscript in M. Lloyd, ed., Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Aeschylus (Oxford 2007), pp. 359–96), and M. L. West, Studies in Aeschylus (Stuttgart 1990), pp. 51–72. The authenticity of the play has been defended by, among others, H. Lloyd-Jones, in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 101 (2003), pp. 49–72, and A. J. Podlecki, Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound (Oxford 2005), pp. 195–200.
4. West, Studies in Aeschylus, pp. 67–72.
5. Euripides’ production included the surviving Medea.
6. Which seems, however, to have been used by Aeschylus in the satyr drama Prometheus the Fire-Bearer (or Fire-Kindler); see frr. 207a and 207b of that play on pp. 55–6 above.
7. There is also a side glance at another evidently well-known myth about Prometheus. At 231–6 we are told that he alone resisted, and frustrated, an attempt by Zeus to ‘obliterate the [human] race altogether and create another new one’; this may refer to his role in the Flood story (Hesiod fr. 2; Epicharmus frr. 113–20 Kassel-Austin, from his comedy Prometheus or Pyrrha) or to another similar tale.
8. We are never actually told this in this play (though it may have been mentioned in Prometheus Unbound, especially if Gaea– Themis was a character there); but in Pindar (Isthmian 8.29–51) it was Themis who revealed to the gods that Thetis was destined to bear a son mightier than his father, and in a parallel tale in Hesiod (Theogony 886–900) it was Gaea, with Uranus, who advised Zeus to swallow Metis and so prevent her giving birth to ‘a son who should be king of gods and men’.
9. The revelation of the secret will result in Thetis being given in marriage to the mortal Peleus and fulfilling the prophecy by giving birth to Achilles.
10. Theogony 523–5.
11. The period is thirteen generations (cf. 773–4), since he meets Heracles not long after his return to the surface. In Prometheus the Fire-Bearer (fr. 208a), in contrast, his confinement is said to have lasted thirty thousand years.
12. See especially Plato, Republic 377d–383c.
13. The spitefulness of Zeus towards mortals is also a common theme of classical Athenian comedy, as in Aristophanes’ Peace, Birds and Wealth, in all of which Zeus is defeated by the mortal comic hero (with the aid of other gods – including, in Birds, Prometheus) and in two of which he is deposed from power.
14. See 149–51, 310, 439, 942, 955, 960.
15. And the original audience knew from the start that it was certain to happen; for they lived in a world in which on the one hand Zeus still ruled, and on the other Prometheus was a recipient of cult.
16. See H. D. F. Kitto, Form and Meaning in Drama (London 1956), pp. 66–86; A. H. Sommerstein, Aeschylean Tragedy (Bari 1996), pp. 273–88, 383–90.
17. See 4–5, 15, 20, 31, 142, 157, 269–70, 563, 618, 1016–17.
18. This Athenian method of capital punishment involved clamping the criminal by the neck, wrists and ankles to a large board and standing the board up, perhaps against a wall, in such a way that the condemned man’s feet did not reach the ground; he would be left degradingly and agonizingly exposed, with no one permitted to come near him, probably until sunset, when, if still alive, he would be strangled by tightening the neck clamp. Euripides’ brother-in-law is subjected to this treatment (for sacrilege) in Aristophanes’ play The Women at the Thesmophoria (930–1208) until Euripides rescues and releases him. See L. Gernet, The Anthropology of Ancient Greece (Baltimore 1981), pp. 252–76 (translation of an article first published in 1924). Prometheus, being immortal, will remain thus not for one day but day and night for an indefinite period (19–34) – though for the actor’s benefit a discreet footrest will doubtless have been provided.
19. See note on 1093.
20. He does not mention dismounting or remounting, though his line ‘Your words are plainly meant to send me back home’ (387) – his first single-line speech in the scene – provide a possible occasion for the latter.
21. See notes on 128 and 140.
22. See note on 283/4.
23. And presumably for most of the following play as well.
24. This feature too, it would seem, was shared by this play with Prometheus Unbound – where even the one mortal character, Heracles, is destined to become a god eventually.