The Greek Plays

by The Greek Plays- Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles

  *35 The line is probably not genuine but inserted later, an interpolation.

  *36 Athena was thought to have been “born” (that is, released from Zeus’ head) near a river or lake called Triton, in Libya (the Greek term for North Africa).

  *37 In the Chalcidice, in northern Greece, reputedly the site of the battle between the Olympian gods and the giants, in which Athena took part.

  *38 Apollo.

  *39 The Greeks wore white robes at joyous or celebratory events.

  *40 A lacuna, or gap, in the surviving manuscript text.

  *41 The god of war, here standing for violence generally.

  *42 The text and interpretation of these three lines are in vast dispute.

  *43 Theseus was a mythical early king of Athens, so his “descendants” are the Athenian people. The idea that the goddess Athena had secured for the Athenians sovereignty over a region near the river Scamander—that is, near Troy, in Asia Minor—seems to refer to political events close to the time of the Oresteia’s original production. Athens had been expanding its imperial reach into Asia Minor during the first half of the fifth century and had taken control of Sigeum, a city near the site of Troy, only a few years before this play was written.

  *44 A line that follows this one has been excised, since it seems to have been added by a later hand.

  *45 The mythic hero Ixion murdered his father-in-law and then became a suppliant, appealing to Zeus for mercy. He was purified by Zeus and freed of guilt, but later he attempted to rape Hera and was condemned to eternal torment in the Underworld.

  *46 See note to line 283.

  *47 The robe with which Clytemnestra immobilized her husband before killing him.

  *48 A hopelessly corrupt line, but a meaning in this direction is likely.

  *49 Athena has in effect invented the system of trial by jury, an institution very much in use in Athens in Aeschylus’ day. See introduction for further discussion.

  *50 That is, the Furies will refuse to punish murderers in the future if Orestes is let go.

  *51 A hopelessly corrupt pair of lines, translated with the help of Sommerstein’s comments.

  *52 The “you” here is generic.

  *53 Invoking the rules of a Greek wrestling match.

  *54 A single line is missing from our manuscripts.

  *55 A longer gap in the text, perhaps several lines.

  *56 After overthrowing Cronus by force, Zeus had him, and his siblings, bound in chains in Tartarus.

  *57 A phratry, or brotherhood, was an association based on clan relationship.

  *58 This theory of reproduction, which (in modern terms) would mean that all the child’s genetic inheritance comes from the father, was advanced by certain radical thinkers in fifth-century Athens but was not widely held.

  *59 According to mythic traditions, Athena was born from the head of Zeus, not from a mother’s womb.

  *60 Orestes will have the status of “hero,” a city’s immortal protector even after death. Recent events stand behind this claim that Orestes will “fight beside” Athens forever: the Athenians had, not long before this play was produced, become military allies of Argos, the city to which Orestes belonged.

  *61 Aegeus was a mythical early king of Athens.

  *62 The Areopagus (Hill of Ares), the place where a high council of the Athenian state met and where murder trials were held.

  *63 The legendary campaign of the Amazons, a nation of warrior women from Asia Minor, against Athens was vengeance for Hercules’ and Theseus’ theft of the Amazon queen Hippolyta’s girdle.

  *64 The Athenian stronghold during the Amazon invasion was the Acropolis.

  *65 Two places that were on opposing extremes from Athens, both geographically and culturally. The Scythians to the north were considered quintessential “barbarians,” tribal and nomadic; the Peloponnese to the south were associated with the authoritarian Spartans, who dominated that peninsula.

  *66 See note to line 441.

  *67 “Pheres’ house” is the palace of King Admetus, in Thessaly. While Apollo was staying there incognito, the day of Admetus’ death arrived, but Apollo, who had grown fond of his host, tricked the Fates (by getting them drunk; see p. 445) into allowing another to die in his place. Alcestis, Admetus’ wife, agreed to die in her husband’s stead (with consequences that form the plot of Euripides’ Alcestis, in this volume).

  *68 Pebbles were used as ballots in many kinds of Greek voting.

  *69 Under Athenian law, a tie vote went in favor of the defendant.

  *70 Zeus. He was invoked with libations at a fixed point during a banquet.

  *71 The recent Athenian treaty of alliance with Argos is once more being referenced by Aeschylus (see line 672 and note).

  *72 The extant text of this line makes little sense; I translate what was probably the general sense.

  *73 The Erechtheum was a hero’s shrine on the Acropolis, dedicated to a mythical Athenian king, Erechtheus.

  *74 A rather shocking prayer to modern ears. Athenian militarism was at a peak at the time the Oresteia was written, a time when Athens’ empire was at its greatest extent and conflict with Sparta was beginning.

  *75 Lines 963–64 are extremely difficult, and probably corrupt; my translation represents a probable general meaning.

  *76 A mythic Athenian king.

  *77 Probably a lacuna, a gap in the surviving text.

  *78 Another lacuna, this one possibly quite long.

  *79 The text appears to be quite corrupt, but Headlam’s plausible reconstruction is the basis for my translation.

  *80 Garvie’s reconstruction is the basis for my translation.

  INTRODUCTION TO PROMETHEUS BOUND (POSSIBLY BY AESCHYLUS)

  Prometheus Bound is both the most stationary and the most wide-ranging of Greek dramas. Its protagonist lies immobile from the first scene to the last, chained to an outcropping of rock in remotest Scythia, the Siberia of the Greek world. But from that fixed point, the play surveys the entire universe. In two great speeches, Prometheus describes the future wanderings of Io, the young girl horribly transformed into a hybrid of human and cow, across the most alien and distant stretches of geographic space. In other speeches he looks back across all of time, describing his own role in bringing Zeus to power and in leading humankind out of a bestial condition. Though Prometheus’ body is bound by iron chains, his all-seeing mind carries us to realms far beyond the reach of other dramas, even to Olympus and its cadre of impetuous young gods.

  The phrase “young gods” strikes the modern ear strangely. Most religions of our day center around a God who transcends time, indeed who precedes time and the physical universe. But in the more temporal scheme of Greek mythic cosmology, the universe had been ruled by three generations in turn, first grandfather Uranus, then father Cronus, then Zeus. The early Greek poet Hesiod, in the Theogony, cast this evolution as a story of progress, in which the triumph of Zeus over the older Titans brings in a new era of justice and stability. Aeschylus—perhaps the author of Prometheus Bound but perhaps not—developed that idea in his Oresteia. In the final play of that trilogy, the Eumenides, a set of older divinities, the Furies, bow to a youthful Olympian regime represented by wise, sound-minded Athena. But newer rulers, as the Greeks had often learned from harsh experience, were not always better ones. The play before us inverts the evolutionary scheme of the Eumenides, taking its stand with an older Titan order against the upstart Olympians.

  Prometheus Bound and Eumenides are the two surviving Greek dramas in which gods dominate the stage and human beings have mere supporting roles. In both plays, everything is at stake: in Eumenides, the fertility or sterility of the earth; in Prometheus Bound, the stability of Zeus’ rule and therefore of the very universe. Like the Eumenides, moreover, Prometheus Bound seems to have belonged to a connected trilogy—a triptych of plays presented together, the format Aeschylus used to trace a single myth over long stretches of time. But while the Eumenides concludes the Oresteia, Prometheu
s Bound came either first or second in a trilogy that ended, as seems clear from surviving traces, with a Prometheus Unbound. In the original production, the play’s bleak, apocalyptic ending was only prelude to a reconciliation of Zeus and Prometheus, aided, as is here foretold (lines 772–74), by the arrival of a figure, Heracles, who somehow breaks the stalemate.

  Modern readers of Prometheus Bound find it hard to imagine how this reconciliation was achieved. It is the absolutism of Prometheus, the stoniness of his defiance, that thrills us, and that has made this play an inspiration for romantics and rebels through the ages. But the circumstance by which this one play out of three has survived, detached from its larger context, has undoubtedly distorted its meaning. In the end, intransigence is unacceptable; the rift between the gods must be healed, or the whole cosmos is threatened. Somehow the way forward will require compromise and a letting go of old hatreds.

  The roots of those hatreds are explored in the play’s opening scenes, as Prometheus gets shackled to his rock and is lamented over by the airborne Chorus, the daughters of Ocean. Prometheus has given “all-crafting fire,” the source of progress, to humans, in defiance of Zeus, who (as we learn at lines 231–32) wanted to keep them weak in order to destroy them. The punishment Zeus has decreed—imprisonment plus exposure—is stern, but also ungrateful, given that Prometheus had played a crucial role in putting him in power. In the war between Olympians and Titans, here seen as a fairly recent event, Prometheus and his mother had switched sides. Though Titans themselves, they had shared their strategic wisdom with Zeus, enabling him to subdue their own nearest kin (including Atlas, identified in lines 347–50 as Prometheus’ brother).

  Traditional Greek stories about Prometheus, known from Hesiod’s poems, have here been radically reworked. The idea that Prometheus is son of a goddess called both Themis and Gaea (line 209) is totally new. This unique genealogy makes Prometheus far older than in Hesiod and also gives him greater moral weight, since themis in Greek signifies a code of justice sanctioned by the gods. And since Gaea, or Earth, has prophetic powers, Prometheus, her son, is here given knowledge of the future, including one very powerful secret: a goddess whom Zeus will one day marry—her name, Thetis, is never spoken in this play—will bear him a son who will overthrow him. This secret gives Prometheus a bargaining chip in his showdown with Zeus, and Zeus’ need to extract it prompts him to devise new torments for his adversary, including the famous liver-eating eagle (first mentioned at lines 1021–25).

  From knowledge comes power, and Prometheus’ theft of fire is reimagined, in two crucial speeches at this play’s center, as a gift of knowledge. Here we learn that “all arts that mortals use come from Prometheus” (line 506)—not only the kindling of fire but agriculture, medicine, letters and numbers, and even Prometheus’ own great skill, prophecy. Thanks to these teachings, humankind has risen out of its original state of darkness and misery: “Like crawling ants they hid themselves in holes” (line 452). This unique conception of Prometheus as a hero of enlightenment, who dispels fear and ignorance with technology, has made him a compelling figure in a modern world constantly reshaped by science. Mary Shelley gave her novel Frankenstein, the story of a man who uses technology to conquer death, the subtitle The Modern Prometheus; nuclear scientists who created a new element in an atomic laboratory in 1945 named it promethium.

  Prometheus never explains why he made himself the civilizer of early mortals, or why he saved them from destruction. As a victim of Zeus’ power he seems to feel a deep bond with other victims, including even the monster Typho, a serpentlike creature blasted by thunderbolts (lines 351–72). Prometheus’ strongest connection, however, is to a mortal woman. When Io, a beautiful maiden turned part cow, makes her grotesque entrance at line 561, singing in frenzied meters as a stinging fly goads her onward, the Prometheus Bound moves in a surprising new direction. We see Zeus now portrayed not only as tyrant but as sexual predator. The sufferings of Io—her exile, metamorphosis, and phantasmagoric future wanderings—attest to the cruelty of an Olympian regime that can treat human beings as mere instruments of gratification.

  Zeus never appeared onstage in any known Greek drama, but in no play is he more at issue than in the Prometheus Bound, and in none is he more harshly indicted. His projections of power, through brutal henchmen, lackeys, and implements of torture, anticipate those of the modern fascist dictator; there are even hints of a secret police or an ability to spy on his subjects. Defiance of such a ruler seems the only sane alternative, and the final scene, in a departure from normal conventions for Chorus behavior, shows even the daughters of Ocean declaring themselves in revolt. How such a despot could have been rehabilitated by the end of the Prometheus trilogy, such that an audience could celebrate his reconciliation with Prometheus, is very hard to imagine.

  More so than other plays in this volume, Prometheus Bound presents scholars with grave uncertainties as to date and even authorship. Though manuscripts include it among the plays of Aeschylus, that attribution has been questioned—with good reason, in the eyes of the present editors. Since Aeschylean authorship cannot be disproved, and the play cannot be assigned to any other known playwright, we have followed convention in listing it among the plays of Aeschylus. But that should not be taken as assurance that it was written prior to 456 B.C., the presumed date of Aeschylus’ death. Indeed, the play’s interest in the connection between scientific knowledge and political power seems more at home in the cultural milieu of the late fifth century B.C., and some experts would even place it in the early fourth.

  PROMETHEUS BOUND

  Translated by James Romm

  This translation is based on the text of Mark Griffith’s edition for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series, with variants noted in footnotes.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)

  POWER and MIGHT, two servants of Zeus

  HEPHAESTUS, an Olympian god and son of Zeus

  PROMETHEUS, a Titan (one of the gods who preceded the Olympians)

  CHORUS of the daughters of Ocean, sisters-in-law to Prometheus

  OCEAN, a Titan, father-in-law to Prometheus

  IO, a mortal woman

  HERMES, son of Zeus and messenger of the gods

  Setting: A desolate scene dominated by a huge rock outcropping. Power and Might, servants of Zeus, walk onstage, with Hephaestus following behind, dragging a chained prisoner, Prometheus.

  POWER: We have come to the most far-flung tract of the earth,

  to the Scythian road, a wasteland without men.*1

  You, Hephaestus, must execute the orders

  your father has laid on you: to pin this villain

  to these bare rocks with their steep, rocky faces;

  to wrap him in firm fetters of steely chain.

  Just think, he stole your glory—all-crafting fire—

  and gave it to mortals. For this grave misstep

  he must pay compensation to the gods.

  10

  Thus he will learn to love the rule*2 of Zeus

  And cease his fondness for the human race.

  HEPHAESTUS: Power and Might, the jobs Zeus gave to you

  are done already; nothing stands in your way.

  But I—I cannot find it in myself

  to bind a kindred god to this wintry cliff.

  Yet I am forced to find the strength to do it;

  it’s no light thing to flout my father’s words.

  (turning to Prometheus) High-minded son of wise-planning Themis,

  Though neither of us wishes it, I shall stake you

  20

  to this deserted waste with tight-knit bonds.

  Here you shall hear no voice, see no man’s form,

  but scorched beneath the bright blaze of the sun

  your skin will lose its youth. Your only joys

  will be when starry night conceals the daylight,

  or when the sun returns to scatter frost;

  each pain in turn will wear you down wi
th burdens,

  for there’s no one yet born who can release you.*3

  Such are your rewards for loving humans.

  You did not fear the gods’ wrath; though a god,

  30

  you gave to mortals honors beyond limit.

  For that you will stand guard on this grim rock,

  sleepless, unable to sit or bend your knee,

  your many wails and moans uttered in vain,

  for the mind of Zeus cannot be turned by pleas.

  Harsh is the ruler when rule is new-begun.*4

  POWER: That’s enough. Why delay, indulge in pity?

  You should hate the god whom all the gods hate most,

  the one who gave your prize away to mortals.

  HEPHAESTUS: But to harm my kin is dreadful, or my comrade.

  40

  POWER: This I admit. But to shirk your father’s words—

  How can you do it? Don’t you fear this more?

  HEPHAESTUS: Pitiless as ever, I see—and over-bold.

  POWER: Your whimpering for him won’t cure his ills.

  Don’t trouble over what will do no good.

  HEPHAESTUS: Hateful skill of my hands—I curse it now!

  POWER: Why so? I tell you, and it’s no long tale,

  Your craft is not the cause of his hard labors.

  HEPHAESTUS: Still, I wish some other had my calling.

  POWER: No job is light, except to rule the gods.

  50

  No one except for Zeus is truly free.

  HEPHAESTUS: (indicating the chains and tools he has brought)

  I can’t deny it; these things give me proof.

  POWER: Then go ahead and put the fetters on him,

  lest father look and see you loafing here.

  HEPHAESTUS: He’ll see a bridle—ready to be used.

  POWER: Put it around his hands, use all your strength.

  Strike with the hammer. Pin him to the rocks.

  HEPHAESTUS: It’s done. You see the work did not take long.