Prometheus Bound, which may or may not have been by Aeschylus

1/ Apart from the Oresteia, Prometheus Bound seems to be the most referenced and influential among the plays attributed to Aeschylus, though it may or may not have been by him. Doubts began to emerge in the 19th century because of the theme, vocabulary, linguistics, metre, and style, but what can I say, I can’t read it in the original. 

I read the verse translation by E. D. A. Morshead (which sounds better than the verse and prose translation by Alan Sommerstein that I’ve got). 

2/ The play is set on the mountaintop. Before the story begins, Prometheus has helped Zeus defeat the Titans to become the new king of the gods, but he is now punished by Zeus for loving and helping mankind. 

“PROMETHEUS

  […] Behold me, who must here sustain

  The marring agonies of pain,

  Wrestling with torture, doomed to bear

  Eternal ages, year on year!

  Such and so shameful is the chain

  Which Heaven’s new tyrant doth ordain

  To bind me helpless here.

  Woe! for the ruthless present doom!

  Woe! for the Future’s teeming womb!

  On what far dawn, in what dim skies,

  Shall star of my deliverance rise?” 

It is interesting that the play is about Zeus as much as it’s about Prometheus, perhaps even more, but Zeus never appears. 

“CHORUS

  What God can wear such ruthless heart

  As to delight in ill?

  Who in thy sorrow bears not part?

  Zeus, Zeus alone! for he, with wrathful will,

  Clenched and inflexible,

  Bears down Heaven’s race—nor end shall be, till hate

  His soul shall satiate,

  Or till, by some device, some other hand

  Shall wrest from him his sternly-clasped command!” 

The various plays I’ve read from ancient Greece have depicted the gods as lustful, capricious, cruel, and petty, but Prometheus Bound goes even further—the playwright goes for Zeus, depicting him as a treacherous tyrant. Prometheus Bound must have influenced Paradise Lost. Kenneth McLeish tells me that in 19th century’s Europe in particular, “the grandeur of its poetry and the suffering colossus at its centre were so much in tune with the intellectual mood that it was ranked with Hamlet and the Book of Job, and its creator with Dante, Michelangelo and other such artist-supermen.” 

The play is very quotable, I think, full of great passages. 

“CHORUS

[…] Strange is thy sorrow! one only I know who has suffered thy pain—

Atlas the Titan, the god, in a ruthless, invincible chain!

He beareth for ever and ever the burden and poise of the sky,

The vault of the rolling heaven, and earth re-echoes his cry.

The depths of the sea are troubled; they mourn from their caverns

profound,

And the darkest and innermost hell moans deep with a sorrowful sound;

And the rivers of waters, that flow from the fountains that spring

without stain,

Are as one in the great lamentation, and moan for thy piteous pain.” 

I especially love the passages when Prometheus talks about what he has taught mankind. 

“PROMETHEUS 

  […] But listen now

  Unto the rede of mortals and their woes,

  And how their childish and unreasoning state

  Was changed by me to consciousness and thought.

  Yet not in blame of mortals will I speak,

  But as in proof of service wrought to them.

  For, in the outset, eyes they had and saw not;

  And ears they had but heard not; age on age,

  Like unsubstantial shapes in vision seen,

  They groped at random in the world of sense…” 

Prometheus has taught humanity carpentry and architecture and astronomy and mathematics and writing and medicine and so on—that’s why he’s now bound to a rock. 

“PROMETHEUS

  Yet more I gave them, even the boon of fire.

CHORUS

  What? radiant fire, to things ephemeral?” 

3/ I have noted before the clear contrast between ancient Greek plays and the plays of Shakespeare’s time: Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are full of people doing things, flirting, kissing, eating, fighting, killing, etc; ancient Greek plays mostly depict people talking about things or reacting to things, as murder and other horrific things are kept off-stage or hidden from view. 

Prometheus Bound is even more extreme in the sense that the protagonist cannot move around—he’s bound to the rock for the entire play (if it’s ever staged)—it’s a drama of the mind. In terms of plot, it’s even more static than Seven Against Thebes—nothing happens, Prometheus first talks to the chorus of nymphs about his sin of helping humanity and Zeus’s punishment, then he talks to Io (now a cow) about their fate, then he sees Hermes and challenges Zeus to dash his bolt on him. But in terms of conflict and tension, I think there is more in Prometheus Bound than in Seven Against Thebes—different characters warn Prometheus of Zeus’s power and fear his punishment, but Prometheus becomes more and more defiant as the play progresses—there is an increasing sense of tension and threat even though Zeus never appears, and that culminates in the final moment of the play. In Seven Against Thebes, even though the characters are in a war and threatened on seven sides, it’s written in such a way that I didn’t feel any tension till Eteocles was told that his brother Polyneices was at the seventh gate. 

4/ Another thing I find strange about Prometheus Bound is that Zeus is not only a tyrant (in his behaviour towards Io as well as Prometheus), but he also has limits. 

Zeus is not omniscient—he didn’t know Prometheus was going to steal fire from the gods and give it to mankind. 

Zeus is not omnipotent—he cannot escape his own fate. 

“CHORUS.

  But what hand rules the helm of destiny?

PROMETHEUS.

  The triform Fates, and Furies unforgiving.

CHORUS.

  Then is the power of Zeus more weak than theirs?

PROMETHEUS.

  He may not shun the fate ordained for him.”

He doesn’t even know what’s going to happen. 

“HERMES.

  […] Attend—the Sire supreme doth bid thee tell

  What is the wedlock which thou vauntest now,

  Whereby he falleth from supremacy?” 

Is this not strange? That the king of the gods is not all-powerful? 

This is a fascinating play. 

Surely Shakespeare must have known the Greeks

All the writings I have so far come across tell me that Shakespeare probably didn’t read ancient Greek plays: there were no English translations available at the time, writers from ancient Rome were more important, there’s no evidence that Shakespeare knew Greek or read the Greeks. But Latin translations were available, and I can’t help finding it unlikely that Shakespeare wasn’t curious about Greek tragedy: Roman writers, who influenced Shakespeare, were themselves heavily influenced or inspired by the Greeks; Francis Meres, the first to canonise Shakespeare, in 1598 (!) knew the Greeks (“As the Greek tongue is made famous and eloquent by Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Phocylides and Aristophanes; and the Latin tongue by Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Silius Italicus, Lucanus, Lucretius, Ausonius and Claudianus: so the English tongue is mightily enriched and gorgeously invested in true ornaments and resplendent abiliments by Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Chapman”); Ben Jonson knew the Greeks (mentioning Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in his poem about Shakespeare); and so on. 

There is no way that Shakespeare was in such a circle and never read the Greeks. 

In the Oresteia by Aeschylus, Agamemnon begins with a watchman, like Hamlet; the scene of Orestes confronting his mother Klytaimestra (or Clytemnestra) in Libation Bearers reminds me of Hamlet and Gertrude. There are also similarities between Hamlet and Sophocles’s Electra: both are revenge plays that focus more on the mind of the protagonist than on the revenge itself; Electra is consumed with hate, and concentrates all her hate on her mother Clytemnestra even though Aegisthus also took part in the killing; Hamlet seems to hate his mother even more than he hates Claudius; Electra thinks about her mother sleeping with the murderer of her father, so does Hamlet. 

Sometimes the similarities don’t necessarily suggest influence—perhaps it’s simply that Shakespeare and these playwrights were writing about human nature and human nature doesn’t really change: for instance, Oedipus’s anger and bitterness at being abandoned by his children makes me think of King Lear. But I do wonder if the Oresteia and Sophocles’s Electra influenced Hamlet. 

I also like to think that Shakespeare got inspiration from Euripides for The Winter’s Tale: he adapted the play from Robert Greene’s Pandosto but wanted to change the ending—he clearly didn’t care for all the incestuous stuff—so perhaps he got some ideas from Alcestis and Heracles. As my friend Himadri pointed out, Leontes, like Heracles, destroys his own family in a fit of madness; Leontes, like Heracles, has to live not only with the loss, but also with the guilt. I didn’t see strong parallels between Alcestis and The Winter’s Tale when I first read the play, but now that I’ve thought more about it, there are: however you interpret Hermione’s restoration to Leontes, the scene is a vision of resurrection; and as in Alcestis, the happiness in the ending of The Winter’s Tale is subdued, Leontes cannot undo what he has done to Hermione (and their son), the same way Admetus has to face the fact that he has let Alcestis die in his place. 

Surely Shakespeare must have known these plays. 

Thoughts? 

Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus

1/ This was tough to read. The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s masterpiece, was first performed in 458 BC. Seven Against Thebes was produced in 467 BC, as the third part and the only one that survives of a four-part sequence, preceded by Laius and Oedipus (forming a tragic trilogy) and followed by a satyr play, The Sphinx. Seven Against Thebes is about the fight between Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polyneices, which was not covered by Sophocles’s Theban plays. 

When Sophocles wrote about the same family, Antigone was from around 442–440 BBC, its prequel King Oedipus was around 429–427 BC, and Oedipus at Colonus (ca 407 BC) was written shortly before his death ca 406 BC. 

As my main frame of reference is Shakespeare, when I first got into Greek tragedy, I had to adjust to the plays of Sophocles and Euripides as they’re different, but in the plays before the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s concept of drama is even further away from ours that I don’t quite understand it. The play is static. Part of the play, when the chorus is wailing and lamenting, feels like an opera. Part of the play, when the messenger tells Eteocles about the enemies at the seven gates and paints a picture of each one, feels like an epic poem being performed to the audience. It is very odd. 

2/ I’m just going to poke at the play. 

“CHORUS […] The army has been let loose, it has left its camp! 

This great host of horses is pouring forward at the gallop! 

The dust I see in the air shows me it is so, 

a voiceless messenger but true and certain! 

The soil <of my land>, 

struck by hooves, sends the noise right to my ears! 

It’s flying, it’s roaring like an irresistible 

mountain torrent!”

(translated by Alan Sommerstein) 

If only I could read ancient Greek! 

“CHORUS […] I hear the rattle of chariots round the city! 

O Lady Hera! 

The sockets of their heavy-laden axles are squealing! 

Beloved Artemis! 

The air is going mad with the brandishing of spears!” 

The most interesting images are probably when the messenger describes the enemies. 

“SCOUT […] Tydeus is already growling near the Proetid […]. Teydeus, lusting madly for battle, is screaming like a snake hissing at midday…” 

He describes, he paints a picture of each enemy. What do the audience see? Do they see anything? 

“SCOUT […] I shuddered, I won’t deny it, to see [Hippomedon] brandish his great round threshing-floor of a shield. And it can’t have been a cheap artist who gave him that device on the shield, Typhon emitting dark smoke, the many-coloured sister of flame, from his fire-breathing lips; the round circle of the hollow-bellied shield is floored with coiling snakes. The man himself raised a great war cry; he is possessed by Ares, and he rages for a fight like a maenad, with a fearsome look in his eye…” 

I like the imagery, but all this stuff feels like an epic poem—there’s no drama as we know it, no conflict and tension—till Eteocles hears that his brother Polyneices is at the seventh gate and decides to fight him himself, and the chorus tells him not to do so. 

Aeschylus does raise something interesting, however. When Eteocles hears that Polyneices is at the seventh gate, he says: 

“Ah me, my father’s curse is now truly fulfilled!” 

The curse, presumably about the brothers killing each other for their cruel treatment of their father, would have been in Oedipus, which didn’t survive. But Eteocles’s remark is obviously nonsense—it’s nothing like the preordained fate from which Oedipus couldn’t escape—Eteocles is told that his brother is at the seventh gate—he makes the choice.   

“CHORUS […] And when they die in kindred slaughter, 

killed by one another, and the dust of earth

drinks up their dark red, clotted blood, 

who can provide purification, 

who can release them? O 

new troubles for the house 

mingling with its old woes!” 

4/ The play ends oddly, almost going in a new direction with the herald announcing that Polyneices is not to be buried, and Antigone defying him (which is more or less the plot of Sophocles’s play). However, Kenneth McLeish writes in A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama: 

“Scholars say that Aeschylus wrote only the first four fifths of Seven Against Thebes as we have it. His contribution ends not with the resolution and catharsis, but with a brief report of the princes’ deaths, a reminder that ‘God’s knife is whetted still,’ and a chorus of desolation balancing the chorus of distress at the beginning. Later hands added the Antigone/ Ismene material we now possess – and they unfocused the meaning of the action, introducing a completely new strand (Antigone’s defiance of the council), without integrating it, and –because the quality of the verse is poor—reducing the impact of Aeschylus’ chorus […] How Aeschylus resolved the issues raised by the play and its predecessors in the sequence is now unguessable.” 

Heracles by Euripides

1/ Another blasphemous play from Euripides. 

This is how the play starts: amidst the chaos in Thebes, Lycus attacks the town, kills King Creon, and seizes the crown; as Creon’s daughter Megara is married to Heracles but Heracles has gone to the underworld for the final labour, perhaps to never return, Lycus decides to kill them all—Megara, their 3 sons, and Heracles’s father Amphitryon. 

“CHORUS […] My voice full of grief and mourning,

Like the sad chant of an aged swan;

A ghost of a man, voice with no substance.

Like a figure seen in a dream…” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

About half of the play is Amphitryon, Megara, and the Theban elders (the chorus) lamenting their fate and praying for rescue from Heracles or the gods. Amphitryon begs Lycus to spare them, but Megara doesn’t do so. 

“MEGARA […] I love my children – naturally;

I gave them birth, and care from childhood; and to me

Dying is fearful. Yet I count it foolishness

To struggle with the inevitable. Since we must die,

Let us not die shrivelled in fire, a mockery

To our enemies, which to me is a worse thing than death.

We owe a debt of honour to our royal house.

[…] When the gods spread misfortune like a net, to try

To struggle out is folly more than bravery.

For what will be will be; no one can alter it.” 

She accepts it with poise and dignity. Reminds me of Shakespeare’s Hermione. 

There are lots of good passages in this play: 

“MEGARA […] You weep,

My pretty flowers! Then, like a brown-winged honey-bee,

From all your weeping I’ll distil one precious tear,

And shed it for you…” 

It is moving. 

“AMPHITRYON […] Time as he flies has no care to preserve our hopes;

He’s bent on his own business. Look at me: I once

Was great in action, drew all eyes upon me; now

In one day Fortune has snatched from me everything,

As the wind blows a feather to the sky; all lost.

Wealth, reputation – who holds them with certainty?” 

Euripides gets us to care about Megara and the children, and builds it up so that we all hope for Heracles to return in time and thwart Lycus’s plan to kill the family. And Heracles does return in time! He then kills Lycus. But no, the story takes a different turn as Isis, under the command of Hera, gives him a fit of madness and makes him kill his own wife and children in a frenzy, only because Hera is Zeus’s wife and has always hated Heracles for being Zeus’s son. It is horrific. The play reminds me of Aias (also known as Ajax) by Sophocles (which I think is a more perfect play), but what Hera does to Heracles is so much worse than what Athena does to Aias: Heracles kills his own wife and children! 

“HERACLES […] She has achieved her heart’s desire,

Toppling to earth, pedestal and all, the foremost man

Of Hellas. Who could pray to such a god? For spite

Towards Zeus, for jealousy of a woman’s bed, she hurls

To ruin his country’s saviour, innocent of wrong!” 

What kinds of gods are these? But it’s not only Hera—Euripides doesn’t seem particularly fond of Zeus either. 

“AMPHITRYON Zeus! I once thought you were my powerful friend. You shared

My marriage, shared my fatherhood of Heracles.

All this meant nothing; for you proved less powerful

Than you had seemed; and I, a man, put you, a god,

To shame. I’ve not betrayed the sons of Heracles.

You knew the way to steal into my bed, where none

Invited you, and lie with someone else’s wife;

But those bound to you by every tie you cannot save.

This is strange ignorance in a god; or else, maybe,

Your very nature lacks a sense of right and wrong.” 

Zeus never appears. Never intervenes. He’s even worse than Apollo in Ion. 

Amphitryon and Heracles are not the only ones chastising the gods either: 

“MEGARA […] How dark and devious are the ways of gods to men!”

Euripides goes further:

“HERACLES Divinity’s impervious

To human feeling. I defy divinity.” 

2/ The good thing about living in London is that when I’m fascinated by a period, such as ancient Greece at the moment, I can just go to the British Museum and look at the artworks and artefacts from that period. 

This is me with a vase depicting characters from the Oresteia: 

This is part of the collection about the Labours of Heracles: 

Addendum: My friend Himadri added: 

“You mention Hermione, but I think the parallel with The Winter’s Tale goes further. Heracles destroys his family in a fit of madness: the madness comes from the gods, but no reason is given. Similarly, there is no reason given for the madness of Leontes, who also destroys his family. And both Leontes and Heracles must live not only with the loss, but also with the guilt.
Shakespeare knew Heracles. He must have done.”