38 pages • 1 hour read
AeschylusPrometheus Bound
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 456A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Conflict Between Power and Justice
Prometheus Bound raises serious questions about the relationship between power and justice. In particular, the play explores Zeus’s power to show that power and justice often are not aligned. Zeus’s rule is consistently defined as tyranny throughout the play. Already in ancient Greece the concept of tyranny possessed negative associations: A tyrant was an autocratic ruler who often resorted to cruelty to achieve their aims. Significantly, Zeus’s power is personified from the beginning by the figures of Might and Violence: These are going to become the qualities that Zeus’s tyranny embodies throughout the play. At the same time, Zeus and his rule are distanced from justice and right. This is notable in the play’s mythical and religious context, because Justice—as a personification—was regularly associated with Zeus’s sovereignty in other examples of early Greek literature, including Hesiod’s epics (the Theogony and Works and Days) as well as other plays by Aeschylus (such as Suppliant Women and Agamemnon). In Prometheus Bound, on the other hand, justice—or Justice—is completely absent from Zeus’s exercise of power. Far from being just, Zeus’s rule employs “customs that have no justice to them” (150), while “his justice [is] / a thing he keeps by his own standard” (186-87).
Zeus’s power meets with different responses from the characters of the play, many of them negative. Prometheus stands out for his defiance: While other characters—including Hephaestus, Ocean, and the Chorus—acknowledge that Zeus’s behavior can be cruel and tyrannical, only Prometheus defies him. Prometheus is proud of this fact. He alone “dared” (234) to disobey Zeus, and in this sense, only he is free of Zeus’s power (his outward physical torments notwithstanding). Io, another victim of Zeus’s injustice, is likewise critical of divine power. Other characters, such as Hephaestus and Ocean, express dissatisfaction with Zeus’s exercise of power but are too afraid to defy him. Might and Hermes, on the other hand, embrace Zeus’s power and his control of the cosmos, becoming savage instruments in their own right.
Throughout the play, Zeus’s tyranny is connected with novelty and insecurity. Zeus rules unjustly, in other words, because he believes that this is the only way to maintain his power. Once again, justice is not presented as a consideration—hence the Chorus’s observation that “every ruler’s harsh whose rule is new” (35), or Ocean’s depiction of Zeus as he who “newly sits on the all-powerful throne” (389). But Prometheus shows that this attitude is misguided: Nothing Zeus does can exempt him from his fate—and it is Zeus’s fate to eventually fall, no matter how tyrannically or unjustly he wields his power.
The Consequences of Defying Tyranny
Prometheus’s punishment, described at the beginning of the play, serves as a chilling illustration of the consequences experienced by those by defy tyranny. For stealing fire from the gods, Prometheus finds himself nailed to a remote cliff, a punishment so horrific that it turns the stomach of Hephaestus, the god sent to do the nailing. Those gods who witness Prometheus’s punishment stand in awe of Zeus’s power: Even those who are critical of Zeus see no point in fighting him—as the Chorus declares, “That is a fight that none can fight, a fruitful / source of fruitlessness” (903-04).
Yet Prometheus—alone of all the characters in the play—refuses to accept that the consequences of his defiance are meaningful. Even as he is nailed to the cliff, he maintains that he “care[s] less than nothing / for Zeus” (939-40), and tells Hermes that:
There’s not
a torture or device of any kind
which Zeus can use to make me speak these things,
till these atrocious shackles have been loosed.
So let him hurl his smoky lightning flame,
and throw into turmoil all things in the world,
with white-winged snowflakes and deep bellowing
thunder beneath the earth: he shall not bend me
by all of this […] (988-96).
In his obstinacy, however, Prometheus becomes remarkably close to Zeus and the gods he fights against. Just as Zeus’s punishment is so severe precisely because his “mind […] is hard to soften with prayer” (34), so too does Prometheus worsen his own punishment because he stubbornly refuses to let himself be “softened” (1008).
The political terminology used to describe Zeus’s power throughout the play—particularly the emphasis on his rule as a “tyranny”—also suggests important links with contemporary Athenian history. In the democratic Athens of the fifth century BCE, tyranny had acquired distinctly negative associations. In Aeschylus’s own time, the historical figures of Harmodius and Aristogeiton were celebrated in Athens for their role in the assassination of Hipparchus, one of the sons of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus, and entered legend as “tyrannicides” (even though it was not Hipparchus but his brother Hippias who was the reigning tyrant). During the fourth century BCE, some time after Prometheus Bound was written, the Athenians would even pass a law making it legal to kill any citizen suspected of conspiring to install a tyranny. The Athenians feared tyrants precisely because the consequences of defying them could be so severe. At the same time—as Prometheus highlights again and again in the play—it is precisely for this reason that it is so important to defy tyrants.
The Role of Knowledge and Enlightenment in Human Progress
Prometheus gives a detailed account of human progress at the beginning of the second episode of Prometheus Bound. According to Prometheus, “all human arts come from Prometheus” (506). Prometheus claims that he not only gave humanity fire but also taught them important technologies and arts (writing, sailing, medicine, sacrifice, and divination) that enabled them to realize their potential. It was not only the gift of fire but the gift of knowledge that enabled human progress: Thus, before Prometheus, humans “[l]ike the shapes of dreams dragged through their long lives / and muddled everything haphazardly” (449-50).
The gods’ contribution to human progress, on the other hand, is ambivalent. In their relationship with mortals, the gods of Prometheus Bound are either indifferent or actively hostile. At one point, Prometheus claims, Zeus plotted to wipe out humanity altogether. Later, says Io, Zeus makes a similar threat when he demands that Io give in to his lust for her. Before Zeus and the other gods, moreover, humans are completely helpless and powerless: As the Chorus notes, their “plans […] shall never / surpass the ordered law of Zeus” (551-52). Because of this, Prometheus’s decision to help humanity against the gods is a losing bet, a decision to side with the weak against the powerful that seemingly suggests a lack of “foresight.” Even Prometheus cannot deny that, on the surface, his decision to help weak humans seems foolish, but Prometheus is also aware that in acting as he did, he was doing exactly what he needed to do. Becoming humanity’s benefactor was Prometheus’s destiny from the beginning.
The highly materialistic account of human progress given in Prometheus Bound has clear links with contemporary Greek thought. Throughout the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, Greek philosophers such as Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, and Democritus sought to shed light on how humans used knowledge and reason to develop civilization and society. A particularly interesting connection, however, can be made with Protagoras, a fourth-century BCE philosophical dialogue by Plato. Here, Plato recounts a myth that features various characters known in other ancient mythical texts to present one of the earliest known accounts of the creation of humanity.
Plato has Epimetheus—Prometheus’s brother—fashion humanity without any means of self-preservation (in contrast with animals, who have such attributes as fur to keep them war, talons to catch prey, or feathers to fly). Because of this oversight, humans are entirely helpless unless they have fire and crafts, which they receive as gifts from Prometheus. In Plato’s Protagoras, as in Prometheus Bound, Prometheus gives humanity not only fire but also crafts—technologies and arts that are the product of knowledge and enlightenment. It is thus the fruits of the intellect, more than anything else, that enables humanity’s progress.
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