Friday, February 4, 2022

Prometheus Bound by let's-call-him Aeschylus - This is what you get / for loving humankind.

This week’s play is Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus, or maybe not – A Common Reader here reviews a book arguing the “not” case – and first written and performed nobody knows when.  The translator of the Penguin version, Philip Vellacott, wants the play to be late, even posthumously performed, in order for Aeschylus’s ideas about Zeus, to “develop” in a particular way, as if the ideas of writers have to move in a straight line.  No one knows.

But the play is in fact about Zeus, the specific mythical figure but also the concept of godhood.  We are way, way back in the mythological timeline, at the moment Zeus and his siblings have overthrown their parents, the Titans.  Prometheus has been sentenced by Zeus to imprisonment and torture on a Scythian mountaintop, where the play opens with embodiments of Power and Violence dragging Prometheus onto the stage.  Says Power:

He must submit

      To the tyranny of Zeus

And like it, too.

He’ll learn.  (29, tr. Scully and Herrington)

Or, in Vellacott, “Till he be taught to accept the sovereignty of Zeus” (20).  I read the Oxford translation by poet James Scully and classicist C. J. Herington as well as Vellacott’s version; this bit sure shows the difference.

Power?  Violence?  Which gods are these?  Violence does not even have any lines.  How do I even know she is there?  Hephaistos the blacksmith – there’s a god I know – addresses them by name.  Greek plays did not have stage directions, but in Prometheus Bound detailed directions often appear in the dialogue, as during Hephaistos’s violent binding of Prometheus to the rock, under the orders of Power:

POWER: Now, hard as you can, hammer the shackles INto him!

                Watch it now.  The Boss checks everything out.

HEPHAISTOS:  I can’t tell which is worse: your looks or your loud mouth.


The possibilities for staging Prometheus Bound are so interesting.  A 2013 outdoor production at the Getty used a five-ton wheel as the mountaintop.  Characters are constantly flying onto the stage, in winged chariots, or in one case on “a winged four-footed creature” (Vellacott, 29).  Were characters lowered on decorated cranes, or was it all left to the imagination of the audience?  This play seems visually richer than the others we have read, even keeping in mind, however poorly, the masks and costumes and dancing.


There’s another thing we know nothing about, the dancing, the music.  At least the masks and costumes are depicted in art.  At one point, another victim of Zeus appears on stage, Io who was turned into a cow (her mask clearly has horns) and raped by Zeus, then hunted and tortured by jealous Hera.  Aeschylus told Io’s story in The Suppliants, while that story is retold in Prometheus Bound.  Her scene ends with the return of her torments:

spirally wheeld

by madness, madness

stormblasted I’m

blown off course

my tongue my tiller

it’s unhinged, flappy

words words thrash

dashed O at doom

mud churning up

breaking in waves

                               (IO charges off)  (73, Scully & Herington)

I assume that is pretty free.  But if I imagine it as song, along with Io’s maddened, terrified cow dance, it could be shocking to see.

Or ridiculous.  I was surprised by all of the humor in Prometheus Bound, as in Hephaistos’s response to Power up above.  The scene with the blustering Ocean, the character who rides the winged beast, is essentially comic.  The argument between Prometheus and Hermes near the end of the play is comic.  Prometheus gives Io a long prophecy because “I’ve more spare time than I could wish for” (69, Scully).  The play begins with a torture scene and ends with another, possibly mental, that leads perfectly into Percy Shelley’s Romantic sequel, but in between there is quite a lot of comedy, audible in both versions I read.

This is what you get

for loving humankind.  (30, Scully and Herington)

Is that comic or tragic?

Next, for a change, is a Sophocles play, Ajax, thought to be an early one which just by probability puts it before the Oresteia.  With a subject from the Trojan War and a cast of famous heroes and themes of human folly and divine fate, Ajax may look more like my stereotype of a Greek play.  It’s another good one.

5 comments:

  1. There is so much going on in this play. I'd forgotten how much, for instance the origin story of mankind, where Prometheus raises humanity from a sort of proto-animal state, giving us speech and vision and mathematics, which all lead to civilization, so a debt owed to the Titans, not to the Olympians. I know that it's in doubt that--assuming Aeschulus wrote this--the play is as political as it looks, but gosh it does look political, with all of the talk of regime change and how Zeus is the new boss so P had best in with him or get out (and all the "accept your fate and beg forgiveness" talk prefiguring the book of Job), etc. But if it's not a political play, if it's more religious in feeling, then the Greeks really were a fatalistic bunch, all in the lap of the gods, and even Zeus, as Prometheus reminds us a couple of times, is fated to lose his throne. Really far less straightforward than I'd remembered it.

    Ajax is great, a real nightmare. Why Athena is so enamored of Odysseus is anyone's guess.

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  2. Vellacott does a beautiful job with the passage where Prometheus talks about giving all knowledge to man. He is describing pre-knowledge man:

    "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 dream, confused and purposeless."

    This play has so many lines that would make good epigraphs to poems or novels.

    How political, how religious? Such a good question.

    I'm eager to get to our first of many Odysseus plays.

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  3. I think what I find powerful about this play is the way its scope encompasses a vast timeframe (from the birth of men through the eventual descendents of Io, presumably years in the future) and geography (through the description of Io's past and future wanderings) and embeds it all in a single location (with the helpful device of a prophetic main character). It's also interesting that Zeus doesn't appear in a play that's clearly about him. The depiction of him as a "tyrant" in a "fortress", as Prometheus refers to him while talking with Hermes (in Ian Johnston's translation; David Grene has "tower") is managed at the structural level as well as the textual.

    It's easy to see why the Romantics loved Prometheus. "Do you think I will crouch before your Gods — so new — and tremble? I am far from that." (Greene.) I should really read Shelley's Prometheus Unbound sometime.

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  4. Yes, it is the only surviving play with a cosmic scope, as you say somehow brilliantly captured in what is essentially a single scene where the central figure can't even move.

    Prometheus is such a great Romantic before the fact. The great rebel.

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