The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Aeschylus · a tragedy for performance · 1,093 lines in the standard numbering · transmitted under Aeschylus’ name, its authorship and its date contested, with the 450s to the 430s BC argued · scored on the Greek as it stands, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Greek quoted only where its words are certain, with Sommerstein’s Loeb for sense
Mode
Tragedy of resistance: a protagonist who cannot act, a plot that moves only by what he will and will not say
Mythos
The benefactor bound for love of mortals; the foreknower who cannot use what he knows; the immobile sufferer whom the powers visit; the secret that can unseat the king of heaven
Phase
One action at one place: the binding, the visitors in turn, the refusal, the cataclysm; Prometheus on stage, fixed, from the first line to the last
Presentation
Drama for the Athenian festival, needing only two speaking actors after the prologue; a chorus that arrives by air, a god on a winged beast, and an ending in which the rock and its prisoner are struck down into the earth; how these were staged is not known
Register
From Kratos’ brutality and Oceanus’ comedy to the catalogue of the arts, Io’s frenzy and itinerary, the cut of the exchange with Hermes and the storm of the close; the lyric short and plain, about a seventh of the lines
Scale
One rock and one prisoner, with the war and succession of the gods, the whole rise of human culture and the known world of Io’s wandering spoken around him
Governing Proposition
Zeus has newly won the rule of heaven, and his agents nail to a rock the Titan who helped him win it and then gave mortals fire and every art. The prisoner cannot move from the first line to the last. The chorus come to him, then Oceanus with advice, then Io, a girl half turned to a cow and driven across the world, then Hermes with threats; he knows a secret that could unseat the king of the gods, and he will not tell it, and the earth takes him down. The wager of the play is that a tragedy can be made of resistance alone: that a will which cannot act and will not yield, set against a power harsh because new, can hold a stage, and that the gifts of civilisation are a theft from power paid for by the one who stole.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens on a binding. Two agents of Zeus bring a prisoner to a rock: Kratos, Power, who speaks, and Bia, Force, who does not. With them is Hephaestus. Kratos is brutal; Hephaestus pities the one he must fasten. The play’s question, force against sympathy, is put in their two voices before the prisoner has said a word, and the prologue gives it its rule: “hapas de trachys hostis an neon kratēi”
“every one is harsh who newly rules” (35). Zeus is new to his throne, and the play will show what newness does to power.
The prisoner is Prometheus, a Titan, and through the whole prologue, while others nail him, he is silent. That silence is the first statement of the form. For the rest of the play he will not move; he is on stage, fixed to the rock, from the first line to the last, and every other figure comes to him. His only deeds will be words, silence and refusal. A protagonist who cannot act is set at the centre of a tragedy, and after the prologue the play needs only two speaking actors to carry it.
The prologue takes about a twelfth of the play. When the binders have gone, the man in chains speaks, and the first thing he does is not to complain to men or gods but to call on the world: the sky, the winds, the rivers, the earth, and the sea. The binding has been shown as spectacle and as argument at once, and the rest of the play will be visits to a fixed point.
Movement II
The first words Prometheus speaks alone are among the play’s heights: an invocation of the elements that sees in the sea “kymatōn anērithmon gelasma”
“the countless laughter of the waves” (89 to 90). It is transport, spoken by a man in chains. Then the chorus arrive, the daughters of Oceanus, and they come by air: the text gives them a winged car. They are sympathetic and frightened, and they counsel prudence. How the arrival was staged is not known.
To them Prometheus tells why he is here. When the gods fought for the rule of heaven, he sided with Zeus and helped him win; and the new king, as tyranny does, trusted no friend, and turned on the ally who had made him. Prometheus took the part of mortals. He gave them fire, and he gave them more: “typhlas en autois elpidas katōikisa”
“I settled blind hopes in them” (about 250), so that they would cease to foresee their death. Whether that gift is a mercy or a deception is one of the questions the play leaves open. Of his crime he says: “hekōn hekōn hēmarton, ouk arnēsomai”
“Willingly, willingly I erred, I will not deny it” (about 266).
Oceanus comes next, on a winged beast, a busybody god offering to plead with Zeus and counselling the prisoner to yield. The scene is a comic interlude of over a hundred lines, and its argument, prudence against defiance, has already been made by the chorus; its tone wobbles between comedy and argument, and a reader who subtracts looks here first. Yet it obeys the play’s law: it is accommodation to force, offered and refused. He goes as he came, on his winged mount. Between the scenes the chorus sing, briefly; the odes are short and plain, and the lyric of the whole play comes to about a seventh of its lines.
Movement III
At the centre stands the speech of the gifts, the thing Prometheus is punished for. It begins with mortals as they were, who “blepontes eblepon matēn”
“seeing, saw in vain” (about 447), and then it counts what he gave them: houses; the seasons read in the stars; number; letters; the yoke; ships; medicine; divination; the metals under the earth. The speech is a catalogue that becomes an argument, built with an orator’s control, and it is grand by argument rather than by image.
It ends in one line: “pasai technai brotoisin ek Promētheōs”
“all arts for mortals come from Prometheus” (506). Hesiod’s Prometheus was a trickster whose cleverness brought misery on men. This one is a benefactor, the son of Themis, whom the text makes one with Earth, the foreknower whose name the play makes mean forethought. Civilisation, in this account, is a theft from power, and the one who stole pays for it on the rock.
Then he states the limit of his own gift, in the play’s hardest line: “technē d’ anankēs asthenestera makrōi”
“craft is weaker far than necessity” (514). Foreknowledge here is a torment, not a power. He knows the future, and he knows a secret that could unseat the king of heaven, and he can do nothing with either but keep it. The plot will move only by what he will and will not say.
Movement IV
Then Io comes, and the play’s one body in motion enters in frenzy. She is a mortal girl, half transformed, horned like a cow, driven by the gadfly and by the ghost of Argus. She is the second victim of the same power: the desire of Zeus has made her what she is, and she suffers without knowing why. Of all the visitors she is the only one not a god, and the only representative of the humankind the gifts were for.
Prometheus prophesies her wanderings. Her scene is the largest single block in the play, nearly a third of it, and much of it is itinerary: the long geography of her wanderings, catalogues of peoples and rivers across the known world, more than the knowledge needs. There the verse becomes geography, and the form is held open for exposition. The figure on the rock, who cannot take a step, maps the world for a girl who cannot stop.
But the itinerary has an end. Her wandering ends in a birth by a touch, and from her line, “in the thirteenth generation”, as the text has it, will come Heracles, and with him the release of the prisoner. The line from her body to Heracles is the shape of the future that Prometheus alone knows. The weak and the strong are measured by one law: Io is what the power of Zeus does to the weak, and her descendant will undo what it has done to the strong. When her scene is done the chorus sing their shortest ode, about twenty lines, among the shortest in tragedy.
Movement V
Hermes comes last, sent by Zeus for the secret. He serves, and he threatens, and the exchange between them is cut line against line. Prometheus answers him with contempt: “haplōi logōi tous pantas echthairō theous”
“in a single word, I hate all the gods” (about 975). Hermes and the chorus both name his stubbornness for what it is, and the play leaves open whether it is a fault, so that the tragedy is one of pride as well as of injustice. He will not tell.
Then the threats are carried out. Elsewhere the play has told of Typhon, the monster pinned under Etna and the eruption to come; now the earth itself shakes, “ergōi kouketi mythōi”
“in deed and no longer in word” (about 1080), and the rock and its prisoner are struck down into the earth. The chorus, who counselled prudence through the play, choose at the end to stay with him and share the punishment. The comedy of Oceanus and this ruin obey one law: one counselled accommodation to force, and this is force’s answer to the refusal of it.
The last words are the prisoner’s, to the sky he first called on: “hōs ekdika paschō”
“how unjustly I suffer” (1093). The verdict on Zeus is not given. Two other Prometheus plays are named in the ancient catalogue, Prometheus Unbound, of which fragments survive, and Prometheus the Fire-Bearer, of which almost nothing does, and whatever reconciliation they held is lost with them. The play is not credited with a resolution it does not contain. What it holds is a will that cannot act and does not yield, and it holds it to the last line.
Act III · The Twelve
The architecture is a sequence of visitors to a man who cannot move, and most of it is required. The binding must be shown by two agents, one brutal and one pitying, because the play’s question, force against sympathy, is put there before Prometheus speaks. The gifts must stand at the centre: they are what he is punished for. Io must come, the second victim of the same power, whose line leads to the future he alone knows. Hermes must close, because the secret is what Zeus wants. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the Oceanus scene, a comic interlude of over a hundred lines whose argument the chorus has already made, and the long Io geography, catalogues of peoples and rivers beyond what the knowledge needs.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. First, the pathology of new power: “hapas de trachys hostis an neon kratēi”
“every one is harsh who newly rules” (35), with tyranny’s disease, to trust no friend, told in the rise of Zeus as the betrayal of the ally who won it for him. Second, that civilisation is a theft from power, paid for by the one who stole. Third, the mind that knows and cannot act: foreknowledge here is a torment, not a power, and “technē d’ anankēs asthenestera makrōi”
“craft is weaker far than necessity” (514). Held below the top because the play’s verdict on Zeus is withheld into a sequel that is lost: its truth is the condition of resistance, not a judgment on justice it can complete.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The heights are many and of two kinds. The cosmic: the first words Prometheus speaks, alone, to sky, winds, rivers, earth and the “kymatōn anērithmon gelasma”
“countless laughter of the waves” (89 to 90), transport spoken by a man in chains; the Typhon passage, the monster pinned under Etna and the eruption to come; and the close, where the earth shakes “in deed and no longer in word” and the prisoner calls on the sky to witness how unjustly he suffers. The human: Io’s entry in frenzy, driven by the gadfly and the ghost of Argus, the play’s one body in motion. Frequency counts against it: the gifts are grand by argument, not by image, long stretches of the Io scene are itinerary, and the short, plain lyric rarely lifts on its own.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built, not evoked: the whole play is the construction of a figure. Hesiod’s Prometheus is a trickster whose cleverness brings misery on men. Here he is the son of Themis, whom the text makes one with Earth; a Titan who sided with Zeus and was betrayed by him; the foreknower whose name the play makes mean forethought; and the benefactor who gave mortals not only fire but blind hopes, so that they would cease to foresee their death. The pattern is load-bearing: the rebel bound for love of mortals, the immobile sufferer whom the powers visit, the secret that can unseat the king of heaven. Io builds a second pattern on the same frame. The particular holds: this Prometheus is irascible, proud and vindictive in speech, and he is the figure later centuries took up.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The departure from the inheritance is large and named. Against Hesiod, the play turns the trickster into a philanthropist and the just order of Zeus into a new tyranny, harsh because new: a theological wager at a festival of Dionysus, before a city that sacrificed to Zeus. Against the form of tragedy as it stood, it puts at the centre a protagonist who cannot act, from the first line to the last, casts it wholly with gods but for Io, and makes its plot a secret withheld. The stake was real: a play that indicts the king of the gods could be heard as impiety, and a fixed hero risked a static play. Held below the higher figures because a trilogy, if the play stood in one, likely carried the swerve toward reconciliation, and the visitor structure is a received shape.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. Its knowledge is of a will that cannot act and does not yield, and the form is immobility: the protagonist nailed to the rock for the whole performance, every action brought to him, his only deeds words, silence and refusal. His silence through the prologue, while others nail him, is the first statement of it. The secret is the second instrument: the plot moves only by what he will and will not say. The visitors are graded as answers to him: Oceanus counsels yielding, Io suffers without knowing why, Hermes serves. “hekōn hekōn hēmarton, ouk arnēsomai”
“Willingly, willingly I erred, I will not deny it” (about 266). Held off the top by the Io scene’s exposition and an open end that leans on a sequel the form does not contain.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: some two and a half millennia of reading, the Byzantine school texts with their scholia, and a modern commentary that has not closed its questions. Is Zeus a tyrant, or a young ruler who will learn, as the lost sequel seems to have shown? Is Prometheus’ stubbornness, which the chorus and Hermes name as such, a fault, so that the play is a tragedy of pride as well as of injustice? Are the blind hopes a mercy or a deception? Is the Io scene an episode, or the play’s second half? The authorship question has itself driven decades of close reading of metre and stage, and the yield did not depend on its outcome. Held at 9.0 because the play returns more on its central figure than on its texture: the lyric is thin, and much of the return is to a handful of speeches.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field was Attic tragedy of the fifth century and the poetry of the gods behind it, Hesiod above all. The intrinsic force is high: the play remade a minor theodicy into a drama of power and conscience, and established that a tragedy could be made of resistance alone, without action. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within antiquity it is modest and hard to trace; the reach is delayed and enormous. The Romantic Prometheus comes out of this text: Goethe’s poem (1774), Byron’s “Prometheus” (1816), Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), written as an answer to it, Mary Shelley’s subtitle, and Marx’s foreword to his dissertation, which quotes the play’s hatred of all the gods. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and much of it is the myth’s rather than the play’s form.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival across some two and a half millennia, with the text whole and read without a break. Form: the play survives entire, with the ordinary corruptions of a tragic text and no part lost within it. The loss of the companion plays is charged only so far as this play was made to lean on them; it stands, and is read and performed, as a whole, and the charge sets it at the lower edge of the band rather than below it. Presence: continuous. It was one of the three plays of Aeschylus chosen for reading in the Byzantine schools, which is why it survives in many manuscripts, the Medicean codex among them; it has been translated, taught and staged since the Renaissance, and in the nineteenth century it was among the most read Greek plays in Europe. The contested attribution is no charge on survival: the text survived under the name.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Judged on the Greek. The trimeter is clean, strict and lucid, and the speeches are built with an orator’s control: the gifts speech is a catalogue that becomes an argument, and the line-for-line exchange with Hermes cuts. The dramaturgy is bold: the binding as spectacle, entries by air, a cataclysm for an ending. The charges are on the lyric, which is short, simple in metre and rarely dense in image, so that the chorus is a sympathetic presence more than a voice of the protagonist’s order; on the Io scene, where the verse becomes geography; and on the Oceanus scene, whose tone wobbles between comedy and argument. The music and dance, lost with the performance, are beyond this reading and neither credited nor charged. The making carries the play but is not everywhere load-bearing.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law: force newly rules the world, and every creature is measured by how it stands to it. Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Oceanus, a busybody god offering to plead with Zeus and leaving on his winged mount, and the cataclysm that drives Prometheus into the earth. One counsels accommodation to force; the other is force’s answer to a refusal of it. Io, the furthest element in kind, a mortal, a body, a wanderer across the known world, obeys the law too: she is what the power of Zeus does to the weak, and her line leads to the release of the strong. The chorus move from counselling prudence to choosing to share the punishment, inside the same law. The range runs from gods to a cow-horned girl, from comedy to ruin. Held below 9.0 by the Oceanus scene’s tone and the drift of the geography.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on what one play holds, and it holds much. The order of the gods, its war, its succession and the threat to its future; the state, as tyranny and its psychology; history, as the whole rise of human culture from mortals who “blepontes eblepon matēn”
“seeing, saw in vain” (about 447) to houses, number, writing, medicine and seafaring; the natural order, from the elements of the first invocation to the volcano and the earthquake; the body, in the chained Titan and the tormented Io; lineage, in Themis, Oceanus and his daughters, and the generations from Io to Heracles; consciousness, as foreknowledge and will. These are held in one structure around one fixed point, not listed. What is absent is the ordinary human life the gifts are for: no household, no city, no labour seen. Humankind is spoken of, never shown, and Io is its only representative.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.5 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, then The Unconcealment, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0. A text whole for some two and a half millennia and read without a break; a play that is the construction of a figure, the benefactor bound for love of mortals, whom later centuries took up; a disclosure of new power and of civilisation as a theft from it; and a delayed reach through the Romantic Prometheus.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3, held by the Oceanus scene, a comic interlude whose argument the chorus has already made, and by the long Io geography. Next, The Encompassed at 8.5, held because humankind is spoken of and never shown; then The Made at 8.6, held by a lyric short and plain, about a seventh of the lines, and by verse that becomes itinerary. Among the gated axes, The Swerve at 8.8, whose full departure cannot be measured from a text whose sequel is lost.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.5, The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.9.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Prometheus Bound (Promētheus Desmōtēs), scored as the surviving Greek text as transmitted under Aeschylus’ name, a text for performance of 1,093 lines in the standard numbering. The unit is the one play. Two other Prometheus plays are named in the ancient catalogue, Prometheus Unbound, of which fragments survive, and Prometheus the Fire-Bearer, of which almost nothing does; they are context only, and the play is not credited with a resolution it does not contain. Authorship and date · contested. Doubts were raised in the nineteenth century and argued at length in the twentieth, most fully by Mark Griffith in The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound (1977), on the evidence of metre (a stricter trimeter with fewer resolutions than the undisputed plays), of lyric (short, simple choral odes and a low lyric share), of vocabulary and of stagecraft. Some scholars propose a later hand, among them Aeschylus’ son Euphorion; others keep the play as late Aeschylus, after the Oresteia of 458 BC. No date is secure, and anywhere from the 450s to the 430s BC is argued. The play is scored as it stands; the attribution moves no figure on any axis, and its reach and survival are weighed on what this text did and how it came down, not on the name. It came down as one of the three plays of Aeschylus read in the Byzantine schools, in many manuscripts, the Medicean codex among them. No text was in hand, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on the Greek. Greek is quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with an English rendering beneath that keeps close to the Greek; references are to the standard line numbers and are approximate where marked. Proportions are measured from the standard line ranges of the scenes and songs, whose boundaries differ by a few lines between editions, and are given only roughly. Translations · Alan Sommerstein’s Loeb (2008), for sense, with Smyth’s older Loeb behind it; David Grene’s (1942), for how the play carries into English in performance. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the play. The Greek of the Io geography and of the choral lyric is known less fully than the famous passages; the music and dance of the lyric, lost with the performance, are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. How the aerial entries and the final cataclysm were staged is not known and is not given.