Prometheus Bound and Other Plays

Summary

This volume gathers the four plays of Aeschylus that survive outside the Oresteia, in E. D. A. Morshead's rhymed and blank-verse English of 1908: The Suppliant Maidens, The Persians, The Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound. Each was once part of a connected group of plays; only The Persians was written to stand without its companions, and the others are the surviving panels of lost trilogies. Read together, they show Athenian tragedy close to its beginning, when the chorus still carried much of the drama and a single choice by a ruler could fill an entire play. In The Suppliant Maidens the fifty daughters of Danaus arrive at Argos fleeing marriage to their Egyptian cousins and claim kinship through Io, the Argive priestess loved by Zeus. King Pelasgus faces a true dilemma: to refuse the suppliants is to bring the wrath of Zeus and the pollution of their threatened suicide on his city, but to protect them means war with the sons of Aegyptus. He refuses to decide alone, puts the question to the assembly of Argos, and returns with its vote to defend them. The Persians, staged in 472 BC, eight years after Salamis, sets the Athenian victory inside the Persian capital of Susa. Queen Atossa dreams of disaster, a messenger lists the dead, the ghost of King Darius rises to name his son's bridging of the Hellespont as a madness against the gods, and Xerxes enters in rags. The Seven Against Thebes (467 BC) closes a trilogy on the house of Laius. Eteocles posts a champion against each of the seven attackers at the seven gates, learns that his brother Polynices stands at the seventh, and goes out under his father's curse to a death in which the brothers kill each other. Prometheus Bound is the strangest of the four. Every speaker but the wandering Io is a god. Prometheus, nailed to a Scythian crag by Hephaestus at the command of Zeus, recites the gifts he gave a race Zeus meant to destroy: fire, number, writing, the yoking of animals, ships, divination and the mixing of healing drugs. He refuses the mediation of Oceanus, foretells Io's wanderings and her descendant who will free him, and will not tell Hermes the secret marriage that could unseat Zeus. The play ends with the rock collapsing in thunder. Whether Aeschylus wrote it is still argued, and its Zeus is harsher than the Zeus of his other plays; the lost sequel seems to have reconciled the two. The collection is a strong introduction to how the Greeks thought about suppliancy, the limits of kingship, inherited curses and the gap between human and divine power. It also offers a rare case of a victor writing a tragedy for the defeated, and a Titan whose defiance can be read as courage, as pride, or as both.

Top Lessons

• A king asks his people

  Pelasgus will not choose between sacrilege and war on his own authority. Aeschylus stages an early picture of a ruler binding his city by consent, while showing that consent does not make the choice painless.

• Mourning the enemy

  The Persians honours the fallen Persians while celebrating Greek freedom. Darius's ghost explains the defeat as the fruit of Xerxes' presumption, so the play teaches restraint to the victors as much as it mourns the vanquished.

• Choosing the seventh gate

  Eteocles plans the defence of Thebes rationally until he hears his brother's name. The chorus begs him not to go; he goes. The play asks how far an inherited curse explains a choice that is still his own.

• The giver of arts in chains

  Prometheus's speech on the arts is a compact history of civilization: shelter, astronomy, number, writing, husbandry, ships, medicine and divination. It sets up the play's question whether knowledge given against the will of the ruling god is a gift or a theft.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Prometheus Bound contains one of the earliest literary accounts of medicine as a human art: before Prometheus, the sick had no remedy, and he taught them to mix healing drugs. The Suppliant Maidens credits Apis, a son of Apollo, with healing by knife and charm. Io's god-sent frenzy is described as a goading madness; it is a mythic affliction, not a clinical picture, and any reading of it as illness is interpretive.

• Prometheus Bound, Prometheus's catalogue of arts

  Prometheus lists medicine first among his later gifts: the sick once wasted for lack of food, ointment or draught until he taught the mixing of mild drugs.

• The Suppliant Maidens, Pelasgus's account of Argos

  The king explains that the land is named for Apis, a seer and healer who cleansed it of monsters and devised cures by knife and charm.

• Prometheus Bound, the Io episode

  Io enters driven by the gadfly and cries out in a frenzy sent by Hera; Prometheus foretells the end of her wanderings.