Prometheus bound

278 Pages·2014·0.9 MB·English

by  Aeschylus

AESCHYLUS (525 BC–456 BC), the first of ancient Greece’s major dramatists, is
considered the father of Greek tragedy. He is said to have been the author of as
many as ninety plays, of which seven survive.
JOEL AGEE is a writer and translator. He has received several prizes, including the
Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin in 2008 and the Helen and Kurt
Wolff Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s verse play Penthesilea.
He is the author of two memoirs—Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East
Germany and In the House of My Fear. His translation of Prometheus Bound
was produced at the Getty Villa in 2013. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
PROMETHEUS BOUND
AESCHYLUS
Translated and with an introduction by
JOEL AGEE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
This translation of Prometheus Bound was commissioned by the J. Paul Getty
Museum, the CalArts Center for New Performance, and Trans Arts. This play
was first performed in the Getty Villa’s Outdoor Classical Theater from August
29 to September 28, 2013.
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2014 by Joel Agee All rights reserved.
Cover illustration: Dirck van Baburen, Prometheus Chained by Vulcan, 1623;
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Cover design: Katy Homans Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aeschylus, author.
[Prometheus bound. English]
Prometheus bound / by Aeschylus ; translated and with an introduction by Joel
Agee.
1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics) ISBN 978-1-59017-
861-4() — ISBN 978-1-59017-860-7 (alk. paper) I. Agee, Joel, translator. II.
Title. III. Series: New York Review Books classics.
PA3827.P8
882'.01—dc23
2014043761
ISBN 978-1-59017-861-4
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or
write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
A Note on the Translation
PROMETHEUS BOUND
Characters
Prometheus Bound
Notes
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
FEW GODS or monsters in the teeming world of Greek mythology have ignited the
Western imagination like Prometheus, the Titan who was cruelly punished for
stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man. Nietzsche saw in him the
prototype of the artist, “the great genius for whom even eternal suffering is a
slight price.” Percy Bysshe Shelley portrayed him in his masterwork,
Prometheus Unbound, as the champion of mankind against all manner of
tyranny, celestial and mundane. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a more pessimistic
treatment of the theme, was subtitled “The Modern Prometheus.” Beethoven
associated the Titan with his own revolutionary ideals in the ballet music for The
Creatures of Prometheus and the Prometheus Variations for pianoforte that
developed from it. His Eroica, too, originally titled the Bonaparte, was inspired
by a vision of Napoleon as the Promethean hero of the age.
Messianic ideologies and liberationist movements adopted Prometheus as
well. The Polish nationalist struggle initiated by Józef Piłsudski, for instance,
was named Prometheism. More recently, the short-lived German Democratic
Republic, where I lived as a child and teenager, elected Prometheus as its galleon
figure.[1] That idea probably derived from Karl Marx’s lifelong fondness for
Prometheus as an archetype of revolutionary will. Already in his doctoral
dissertation of 1841, he had called him “the loftiest saint and martyr in the
philosophical calendar.” That was not mere youthful romanticism. A quarter of a
century later, Prometheus appears in Das Kapital (in chapter 13) as an emblem
of the proletariat chained to capital.
There have also been conservative and authoritarian interpretations. The
political philosopher Eric Voegelin regarded Prometheus as a symbol of “the
demonic drive of human existence in its self-assertion and expansiveness,”[2]
opposed by a Zeus who imposes harsh but necessary restraints in accord with
Dike, the spirit of justice. According to the classicist C. J. Herington,
“authoritarians . . . from the medieval Byzantines onward . . . have emphasized
with approval the crushing punishment ultimately accorded to the rebel against
the Supreme Authority.”[3]
There were several treatments of the theme in the ancient world. The most
complete and lastingly famous one that survived was Prometheus Bound.
Throughout antiquity and for centuries after, the tragedy was universally
attributed to Aeschylus (525–456 BC). The scholars of the Great Library of
Alexandria deemed him the author of the play. Various classical authors referred
to him as such. No one thought of questioning tradition and ancient authority
until the mid-nineteenth century, when scholars began to raise doubts about the
portrayal of Zeus in Prometheus Bound. How could the pious author of
Agamemnon or The Suppliant Maidens have portrayed the King of kings as an
unjust and ruthless despot? This objection was met with the argument that the
play was but the first (or, some thought, the second) movement in a trilogy, and
that the whole work described an evolutionary arc that would culminate in the
release of a chastened Prometheus by a matured and compassionate Zeus. Such a
story line, enriched and complicated, of course, by a wealth of dramatic
development, could indeed be constructed out of the surviving fragments of two
other plays—Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Firebringer—that were
traditionally ascribed to Aeschylus.[4] But this theory was not unassailable. Was
an evolving Zeus, let alone a Zeus in need of character reformation, even
conceivable in the fifth century BC? Was the trilogy therefore not probably the
work of a later author? That contention, in turn, was rebutted with instances of
divine personages in plays by Aeschylus who do change and develop. Claims
and counterclaims mounted into a complicated debate over the “Zeus problem”
in Aeschylus that went on for decades. Eventually metrical and stylistic analyses
were brought to bear, both against and in support of the play’s authenticity.
Today, many classical scholars reject the traditional attribution of the play to
Aeschylus. Others still favor the verdict of antiquity. There is simply not enough
evidence to decide the matter one way or the other. The conventional ascription
to Aeschylus is still in use.
The word “drama,” in Greek, means “action,” and action, in modern theatrical
practice, is generally understood to mean the physical accomplishment of a
character’s intentions. Little of the sort seems to be happening in Prometheus
Bound.
“One man, a sort of demigod at that, chained to a rock, orated to, and orating
at, a sequence of embodied apparitions.” That is how Robert Lowell, in a
prefatory note to his translation of Prometheus Bound, summed up the play.
Little wonder that he considered it “the most undramatic” of the Greek classical
tragedies. He was not alone in this opinion. The play has long had the reputation
of being extremely static and therefore all but impossible to stage.
But speech is action, and this is the case not only on the theatrical stage but
also in life, and particularly in the political life of fifth-century Athens. There,
according to Hannah Arendt, “speech and action were considered to be coeval
and coequal,” meaning not only that most political action is transacted in words,
“but more fundamentally that finding the right words at the right moment, quite
apart from the information or communication they may convey, is action.” For
that reason, the polis was “the most talkative of all bodies politic.”[5]
Prometheus Bound is, like all Greek tragedy, a political as well as a religious
play. Its action consists in an ardent, protracted dispute among several
characters, all but one of them immortal, who find themselves pitted between
two diametrically opposed conceptions of social order: on the one hand the self-
legitimizing ethos of tyrannical power, and on the other the idea of a standard of
justice that is binding on rulers and ruled alike. It is not an abstract battle of
words. One of the disputants is chained and impaled at a remote and desolate
corner of the earth. At issue is the justice, or not, of his punishment for rebelling
against the supreme deity on behalf of mankind.
The talk—but the commonplace word is hardly fitting—ranges over a wide
spectrum of rhetorical modes: cunning sophistry, heartfelt appeal, sarcastic
innuendo, brutal command, lyric chant, grandiose declamation, cryptic prophesy,
reasoned analysis, defiant rebuttal, magical invocation, prayerful lament. And all
these are modulations of a single poem, of which we cannot say that it is simply
epic or dramatic, because at different times it is both.
To read the cosmic debate as drama, we need to consider who is speaking,
who is listening, and what is at stake for each of the speakers in finding the right
words at the right moment, or the consequence of failing to do so.
The dramatis personae are Kratos (Might, or Power) and Bia (Force, or
Violence), thuggish enforcers of the tyranny of Zeus; Prometheus, the rebellious
Titan and friend of humanity; Hephaistos, god of fire and metalwork and a
kinsman of Prometheus; Okeanos, or Ocean, god of the earth-encircling stream
that bears his name; a Chorus of water nymphs, the Oceanids, daughters of
Okeanos; Io, the “cow-horned maiden,” a nymph, half human and half divine,
who was transformed into a cow by the lustful Zeus and driven on endless
wanderings by Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera; and finally Hermes, Zeus’s messenger,
who here serves the additional function of an interrogator.
But there is another, unlisted character who is present from the beginning to
the end of the play, though he does not speak and never appears in person. It is
Zeus.
Kratos alludes to the god’s watchful gaze as he presses Hephaestos to carry
out the binding of Prometheus. The daughters of Okeanos warn Prometheus to
guard his words lest Zeus overhear them. Prometheus himself taunts Zeus with
hints about events that will topple him from his throne, and Zeus responds by
sending Hermes with a demand for full disclosure. There is not a moment when
Zeus’s dreadful nearness is not suspected or felt by his subjects on the stage.
And how could it not have been felt by the play’s first audience as well? For
to them the dramatic reenactment of myth, though set in an unimaginably distant
past, was also happening now, at this moment, in a timeless present that included
them and was not belied by a forestage or a curtain. Is it far-fetched to imagine
the effect on that audience as a mixture of intellectual excitement and moral
anxiety, perhaps even a shocked impression of near-sacrilege, at seeing the
Father of gods and men depicted as a despot who “rules by whim”?
The play begins in medias res. Kratos and Bia supervise Hephaistos’s chaining
of Prometheus to a mountain crag on the outermost edge of the earth. In a few
masterly strokes of dialogue, the principal terms of the drama are delineated.
Prometheus has stolen fire from Hephaistos and given it to mortal men, thus
honoring them above their due.
KRATOS
This is the crime for which he now must pay
the price to all the gods, that he may learn
to love the tyranny of Zeus
and quit his friendship with the human race.
The word “tyranny” is used here in the neutral sense of “government by an
absolute ruler,” with no pejorative implication. Kratos, after all, is an executor of
the will of Zeus, his right arm so to speak. But we may assume that the mask
worn by the actor who played his part presented a hideous countenance.
Otherwise the words of Hephaistos objecting to the harshness of Kratos’s orders
would make little sense: “Your tongue repeats the language of your face.”
That statement marks the limit of Hephaistos’s resistance, and with it his
dignity. Traditionally he was conceived to have been born weak and crippled.
Here he is twisted at the core of his moral center by fear of the despotic will that
holds him in its grip. He pities Prometheus, but is compelled to abuse him
nonetheless. He recoils at the brutality of Kratos, but carries out his orders. He
reviles his own skill for the use to which he is being forced to put it, then
expresses pride in his workmanship. He blames Prometheus for the suffering he
himself will inflict—“This is the fruit of your philanthropy”[6]—then begs his
forgiveness.
Prometheus responds with silence. Bia, too, does not speak. Some scholars
have speculated that the prolonged silence of two characters when four of them
are on the stage is merely an awkward consequence of the fact that, in early
Greek drama, the number of speaking actors was always limited to two or three.
But there is nothing haphazard about these characters’ muteness. Bia, as an
embodiment of brute force, needs no words. Hephaistos’s hammer expresses her
meaning eloquently enough.[7] Prometheus’s silence is intensely dramatic: He
has nothing to say to his executioners. It is also a demonstration of superhuman
fortitude, natural enough in a Titan. And it may be the outward sign of an inner
sanctuary where words, in particular his enemies’ words, can find no purchase.
In any case, he does not speak until after they have left.
We may presume that he does not break his silence immediately. Of what use
would words be in his desolate condition? But then he speaks:
Oh sky, oh soaring winds and brightness of the air!
Oh river-springs and countless laughter of the ocean’s waves!
Oh Mother Earth! Oh Sun, all-seeing brilliant eye!
I call you all to witness—see what I, a god,
must suffer at the hands of gods.
Witness the torture and disgrace
I must endure through endless time—
Miseries
designed for me
by the new monarch
of the Blessed.
This is not an oration. Nor is it a soliloquy. He is calling out to the elemental
powers of nature, one by one, imploring them to bear witness for him against the
injustice of Zeus. It is, in a sense, the beginning of a judicial appeal—an
impossible action, in fifth-century Athens, for a man found guilty of a capital
offense,[8] but this litigant is a god and cannot be put to death. Moreover, his
argument calls into question not only the judgment but also the legitimacy of the
judge who rendered it.
The silence that meets his speech[9] comes as a crushing rebuttal. When he
resumes talking, it is to express a heartbroken acknowledgment.
Oh terrible sorrows
Present and to come.
What end is there?