Prometheus Bound

• 1. Introduction

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  Prometheus Bound opens with four characters on stage at once, a staging so unusual that no other surviving ancient Greek tragedy matches it. Kratos and Bia, embodiments of brute power and callous violence, are fastening a silent figure to a mountainside in Scythia. The reluctant blacksmith of the gods, Hephaestus, assists them. And Prometheus, chained and speechless for that first scene, says nothing at all. What kind of play begins with its hero mute and in chains, already defeated? And who wrote it? Those two questions have kept scholars arguing for centuries, and neither one is fully settled today.

• 2. The Myth Behind the Chains

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  Before the play's first line is spoken, the backstory stretches back to a war among gods. Cronus, ruler of the pre-Olympian Titans, had been overthrown by Zeus. Prometheus had fought on Zeus's side in that uprising, known as the Titanomachy. His reward was to watch Zeus plan the destruction of humankind. Prometheus defied that plan. He stole fire and gave it to humans. He also taught them writing, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, architecture, and agriculture. What Prometheus calls the Catalogue of the Arts, lines 447 through 506, is the play's inventory of everything that separates civilized life from bare survival. Zeus's response to all of this generosity toward mortals was to have Prometheus chained to a mountain.

  The punishment carries a particular sting that the play makes explicit. Prometheus himself had been instrumental in securing Zeus's victory in the Titanomachy, and now the same Zeus was having him shackled by a smith-god who clearly found the task distasteful. Kratos, the only one of Zeus's agents who speaks during the chaining scene, delivers his orders harshly and without apology. He frames the chaining as a lesson in Zeus's sovereignty. Prometheus, once Zeus is gone, calls on the wind and mountains' springs and the earth and the sun to witness that he suffers unjustly.

  Prometheus also carries a secret that changes the balance of power. He knows which marriage will eventually end Zeus's reign. He will not reveal it. That secret becomes the spine of the play's conflict, a piece of knowledge that Zeus wants badly enough to send his messenger Hermes to demand it, and that Prometheus is willing to suffer indefinitely rather than give away.

• 3. Visitors at the Rock

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  A chorus of sea-nymphs, daughters of Oceanus, arrives first. They had heard the sound of hammering from within their deep sea-caves and came without stopping to put on their sandals. They hover in the air above Prometheus, uncertain whether to descend, before he invites them down. Their father, Oceanus, follows on a carriage drawn by a winged griffin. He is an older Titan who has made peace with Zeus, and he comes to offer sympathy and advice. Prometheus receives the offer coldly and warns Oceanus to leave for his own safety. Oceanus notes that his winged beast is eager to get back to its stable, and he departs.

  Io arrives next, and her story is the mirror of Prometheus's. She is the daughter of Inachus, king of Argos, and became the object of Zeus's desire. Zeus's wife Hera turned Io into a heifer and had her driven from land to land by the herder Argus. After Hermes killed Argus, Hera inflicted a plague of gad-flies on Io. Prometheus knows her story before she speaks it. In a brief but pivotal exchange, the two recognize each other as victims of the same tyrant. Prometheus then reveals that Io's wanderings will end at the mouth of the Nile. There Zeus will restore her, and she will bear a son named Epaphus. Epaphus will father fifty daughters, and one line descending from those daughters will eventually free Prometheus. That rescuer is not named in the play, but the name Heracles would have been understood by any Greek audience member.

• 4. Departures from Hesiod

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  Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony, written around 700 BC, are the foundational texts behind the Prometheus myth, and Aeschylus knew them well. But the play that he or someone close to him produced departs from those sources in ways that are not minor. Hesiod portrays Prometheus as a lowly trickster and semi-comic foil to Zeus. In Hesiod, Zeus's anger is the cause of humans having to work for their food, and Prometheus's theft of fire triggers the arrival of the first woman, Pandora, and her jar of evils. Pandora does not appear anywhere in Prometheus Bound.

  Aeschylus also split apart the two forms of punishment that Hesiod had presented as a single story. In the version of the Theogony that Aeschylus worked from, the chaining to a rock and the eagle tearing at Prometheus's liver were one continuous torment. The play instead separates them. The eagle only begins its daily attack on Prometheus's liver after the chained Titan has refused to give Zeus the secret he seeks. That structural choice makes Prometheus's silence feel like an active choice rather than passive suffering.

  Perhaps the deepest departure is moral. Hesiod simply reports that Zeus became angry, without asking whether Zeus was justified. The play in contrast presents Zeus as a tyrannical leader. Aeschylus, or whoever wrote these lines, looked at the same events in Hesiod and saw intolerable injustice. Those alterations have echoed through later literature, shaping how the myth has been understood ever since.

• 5. A Lost Trilogy

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  C. J. Herington, a British-born scholar of classical Greek and Latin, argued that Prometheus Bound was never meant to stand alone. He described it as not a self-contained dramatic unity, and suggested that most modern scholars would agree it was followed by a work titled Prometheus Lyomenos, or Prometheus Unbound. Herington also noted that some slight evidence points to a third play, Prometheus Pyrphoros, meaning Prometheus the Fire-Bearer. The problem is that the last two plays survive only in fragments, and some scholars have proposed that those fragments all belong to Prometheus Unbound alone, leaving the question of a two-play or three-play sequence unresolved.

  In Prometheus Unbound, based on what the fragments suggest, Heracles frees Prometheus from his chains and kills the eagle that had been eating the Titan's perpetually regenerating liver daily. The play also reveals that Zeus has freed the other Titans he imprisoned after the Titanomachy, perhaps foreshadowing his eventual reconciliation with Prometheus. In the third play, Prometheus the Fire-Bearer, Prometheus finally warns Zeus not to lie with the sea nymph Thetis. Thetis is fated to bear a son greater than his father. Zeus, heeding the warning, arranges for Thetis to marry the mortal Peleus instead. Their son is Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War. Grateful for that warning, Zeus reconciles with Prometheus. Since the author's full intention died with those lost plays, the arc of the trilogy can only be reconstructed from pieces.

• 6. The Authorship Debate

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  Scholars at the Great Library of Alexandria attributed Prometheus Bound to Aeschylus without question, and that consensus held through antiquity and into relatively recent times. The first serious challenge came from Rudolf Westphal, who in 1857 and again in 1869 questioned whether the text was the work of a single author. In 1911, A. Gercke became the first scholar to reject the Aeschylean attribution outright, and two years later his student F. Niedzballa reached the same conclusion through lexical analysis, identifying words in the play that appear nowhere else in Aeschylus.

  By the 1970s, both R. P. Winnington-Ingram and Denys Page had become skeptical. Then, independently in 1977, Oliver Taplin and Mark Griffith each made forceful cases against Aeschylean authorship on linguistic, technical, and stagecraft grounds. M. L. West supported their view and, after editing all seven surviving Aeschylean plays, concluded that the ascription to Aeschylus was untenable. West placed the play in the 440s-430s era. He also proposed that the author might have been Euphorion, Aeschylus's son, who was himself a playwright.

  Gunther Zuntz challenged Griffith's conclusions briefly, and Maria Pia Pattoni did so at length in 1987. The scholar Wilhelm Schmid raised a different objection: the playwright who showed such piety toward Zeus in The Suppliants and Agamemnon could not be the same person who portrays Zeus in Prometheus Bound as a violent tyrant. Recent computerized stylometric analysis has added weight to the skeptical side, placing the burden of proof on those who uphold the traditional attribution. No consensus has been reached. The play that most forcefully depicts defiance against unjust authority may itself be an act of literary defiance against easy classification.

• 7. Later Stages and Translations

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  Prometheus Bound drew admiration in antiquity. Allusions to the play appear in Aristophanes' The Birds, staged in 414 BC, and in Euripides' fragmentary Andromeda of 412 BC. A performance of the play, not merely a depiction of the generic myth, appears on fragments of a Greek vase dated to around 370-360 BC. In the early 19th century, Romantic writers found in the defiant Prometheus a figure that suited their own sensibilities. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a poem on the theme, as did Lord Byron. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound, borrowing materials from the ancient text and reshaping them for his own purposes.

  The play has continued to attract translators and directors across centuries. Elizabeth Barrett Browning translated it twice, first anonymously in 1833 and again in 1851, the two versions completely different from each other. Henry David Thoreau produced a verse translation in 1843. In 1979, George Eugeniou directed and performed in the play at Theatro Technis London, setting the drama in the Greece governed by the Junta. In 2005, the play reached The Sound Theatre in London in a new translation by James Kerr, with David Oyelowo playing Prometheus.

  A translation by Joel Agee, commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the CalArts Center for New Performance, and Trans Arts, ran from the 29th of August to the 28th of September 2013 at the Getty Villa's Outdoor Classical Theater. That production, directed by Travis Preston with music composed by Ellen Reid and Vinny Golia, replaced the barren cliff with a huge steel wheel. In April 2015, MacMillan Films staged the play for camera using Peter Arnott's translation, with James Thomas directing and Casey McIntyre as the Chorus Leader, using a real skene building whose roof served as the landing and dance platform for the Chorus of Oceanids. The last line of the play, spoken by Prometheus as Zeus blasts him into the earth, is a cry to his mother and to the revolving light of the sky to witness his suffering, a line that has echoed across more than two millennia of performance.