that I’ll fear Zeus’ judgment, turn soft-minded,
and kneel to supplicate the one I loathe—
my hands held up to him in women’s fashion—
to free me from these bonds. I’ll never do it.
HERMES: If I say more, I will be wasting words,
since my entreaties have not softened you.
Rather you bite, like an unbroken colt,
1010
the bridle with your teeth and fight the reins.
But it’s an unsound plan that fuels your rage.
Mere stubbornness, without the help of wisdom,
is weaker, by itself, than everything.
Consider, if you don’t obey my orders,
what storm of evils, what gigantic wave
will break on you, with no escape. My father
will smash this rocky cliff with thunderclaps
and fiery lightning-bolts; he’ll bury you,
entomb you in an envelope of rock.
1020
After an endless stretch of time goes by,
you’ll come back to the daylight. Now the eagle,
that murderous bird, the winged hound of Zeus,
will savagely slash tatters from your body,
a daily banqueter who comes unbidden;
he’ll feast upon your mangled, blackened liver.
And don’t expect these sufferings to end,
until some god agrees to take your place
and volunteers to go down into Hades,
the sunless realm, and Tartarus’ gloomy depths.
1030
Take stock of this. It’s not a boast or fiction.
The future I’ve described is all too real.
The mouth of Zeus does not know how to lie.
Whatever he says, will be. Just look around you.
Consider then. Don’t count on stubbornness,
or ever think it better than good counsel.
CHORUS: It seems to us that Hermes speaks in season,
bidding you let go your willfulness
and choose instead good counsel, a wiser course.
Do as he says. The wise should not do wrong.
1040
PROMETHEUS:*65 All that he said, I knew he would say.
What’s more, there’s no shame if a foe
will get mistreatment from his foes.
So let the two-edged swirl of flame
be hurled at me, and let the air
be roiled with thunder and with winds
in wild convulsion, let the earth
be shaken to its very roots,
let waves of sea foam up and flood
the paths of stars as they cross the skies,
1050
let him throw down my body
into Tartarus’ black pit
with harsh tornadoes of force;
there’s no way he can kill me.
HERMES: One hears such words and schemes
often, from raving madmen.
Such boasts are clearly striking wide
of the mark, close to insanity.
(to the Chorus) You there, who showed
some sympathy for this one’s pains:
1060
Leave this place, and leave it fast,
or else the cruel thunder’s roar
may stun you into witlessness.
CHORUS: Give us some other kind of command
and we might obey. The words you dragged in
we cannot tolerate.
How can you bid us be base?
(pointing to Prometheus) We’ll share with him that which we must.
We’ve learned to hate those who turn traitor.
There’s no disease
1070
I spit on more than treachery.
HERMES: Well, then, remember what I’ve said.
And when you’re caught in folly’s snares,
don’t blame bad luck. Don’t ever say
that Zeus hurled ruin down on you
without forewarning. Don’t, I tell you.
You did this to yourselves. You knew.
Not suddenly or stealthily
or in ignorance will you be coiled
inside blind folly’s endless net.
(Hermes exits. Roaring and thunder are heard as Zeus begins to unleash his cataclysm.)
1080
PROMETHEUS: So! In truth, not just in threats,
the earth begins to quake.
The crash of thunder rumbles back
from the depths below; bright curls of flame
flash forth, and whirlwinds spin the dust.
The clashing winds leap madly about,
vying as if in civil war,
all against all. The upper air
is mingled with the sea below.
Such is the fearsome stroke of Zeus,
1090
leveled at me, in sight of all.
Majesty of my mother Earth,
bright sky that lets the common light whirl round,
you see me here, and see my lot: injustice.
* * *
*1 Scythia was variously defined by the Greeks but generally meant the northeast quadrant of the known world, starting from today’s Ukraine and Armenia. Later traditions situated the scene of Prometheus’ punishment in the Caucasus mountains (but these, too, were variously located).
*2 The Greek word translated here as “rule” is tyrannis, meaning sovereignty seized by force or without constitutional legitimacy. Our English derivative, “tyranny,” has harsher connotations.
*3 Hephaestus appears to speak with unconscious irony. He means that no one can possibly help Prometheus, but his words allude to the birth of Heracles, who will do so, many generations from now.
*4 It has not been long since Zeus overcame his father, Cronus, and the generation of the Titans to take control of the cosmos.
*5 Power here labels Prometheus a sophistēs, using a Greek word that can mean simply “wise man” but also, in a negative sense, “sophist.” In the late fifth century, this word evoked a particularly controversial kind of sage, a teacher of rhetoric who taught morally dubious ways of winning arguments.
*6 Zeus.
*7 In Greek, the name Prometheus translates roughly to Foresight.
*8 The meter shifts in the next line from iambic trimeters to anapests, a marching rhythm, then back to iambic trimeters at line 101, then to anapests again at line 114. Such rapid shifts of meter in an opening speech are highly unusual for Greek drama.
*9 Referring to the imprisonment of the Titans in Tartarus.
*10 Uranus, or Sky, was Zeus’ grandfather, and father of the Titans.
*11 The Chorus here speak in anapestic meter, as does Ocean, who enters below. At line 298 the dialogue returns to iambic trimeter.
*12 Ocean (Okeanos in Greek) was often personified by the Greeks as a god, the form in which he must have appeared in this play; but the name also signifies the ring of seawater thought to surround the landmass formed by Europe, Asia, and Africa.
*13 Since they are both sons of Earth, Ocean and Prometheus are brothers—to the extent that such familial labels can be applied to the earliest generation of gods. Ocean is also the father of Prometheus’ wife, as we learn later.
*14 Scythia was famous as a source of ore.
*15 See note to Persians line 213. The Greek word used here, hupeuthunos, is borrowed from Athenian political vocabulary, where it referred to an annual review of the financial dealings of officeholders.
*16 Prometheus seems here to refer to some previous episode when Ocean took his side, but it is not clear what this is. According to his own earlier account, Prometheus was the only Titan who switched sides and supported Zeus in the war between the gods. Ocean apparently stayed on the sidelines during that war and thus was spared the banishment to Hades that the other Titans suffered.
*17 Atlas, a Titan (and thus a brother of Prometheus), fought in the war against Zeus and the Olympians. After being defeated,
Atlas was given the task of keeping the sky and earth apart, so that the deities Uranus and Gaea would produce no more offspring.
*18 Typho (also called Typhon or Typhoeus), a hundred-headed monster born from Earth, posed the last, and most serious, challenge to the rule of Zeus, according to Hesiod (Theogony 821ff.). The thunderbolting of Typho firmly established Zeus’ power, even more than did the defeat of the Titans in the cosmic war.
*19 An active volcano in Sicily. The playwright imagines that the fire of Typho’s breath survived as the lava that spewed forth from the mountain, furnishing Hephaestus with the heat for his smithy. Pindar in Pythian 1 makes a similar connection between Typho and Aetna.
*20 Prometheus suddenly breaks into prophecy, foreseeing a great eruption that in fact destroyed much of the country around Aetna in the 470’s B.C.
*21 The name of a tribe or people is missing here from the manuscripts.
*22 Colchis (approximately modern Armenia) was thought by some to be the home of the Amazons, female warriors who disdained marriage and childrearing.
*23 The modern Sea of Azov.
*24 As the line numbers indicate, a passage of six lines, found in the manuscripts but in a form almost impossible to interpret, has been omitted here.
*25 A fanciful description of ships traveling under sail.
*26 The habits of birds are important to the art of augury, since the diviner needs to know which bird activities are normal and which constitute signs.
*27 The manner in which the sacrifice burned, and the direction of the smoke, were assigned various meanings by diviners. Despite having said here that the sacrificial portion consists of bones wrapped in fat—the meat being consumed by the worshippers gathered at the sacrifice—Prometheus here omits mention of the legend told by Hesiod and others, that he tricked Zeus into choosing bones and fat as the gods’ portion of the sacrificial animal, leaving the meat for humankind.
*28 Argus, a giant herdsman with a hundred eyes, had been posted by Hera to guard Io and keep Zeus from arranging a tryst with her. Argus had by this time been killed by Hermes, but Io still feels tormented by his ghost.
*29 According to one version of the myth, Hermes put Argus to sleep by playing a soporific tune on a reed pipe before killing him with a stone.
*30 A strangely literal statement, based on the idea that Inachus, Io’s father, is a river god and hence (according to Hesiod’s Theogony) a son of Ocean.
*31 The two principal oracular shrines of the Greek world.
*32 The god who was thought to prophesy at Delphi.
*33 Io’s mask in the original production must have had horns.
*34 Io’s journey describes a rough circle, moving counterclockwise through the whole known world, but both the route and stopping points are very uncertain.
*35 A tribe usually situated by the Greeks on the Black Sea, in modern Turkey.
*36 Not the same mountain chain as the modern Caucasus.
*37 Themiscyra and the river Thermodon are in modern Turkey. The playwright seems concerned to reconcile two different traditions about where the Amazons lived by forecasting that they will relocate from one to the other. The promontory of Salmydessus is far west of these places, but the playwright’s sense of space is very blurry.
*38 Stepmothers in ancient myth were universally cruel.
*39 “Bosporus” comes from the Greek words for “cow-ford.” The name was applied in antiquity to several different straits. Here it designates the waterway formed by the eastern tip of the Crimean peninsula and the mainland, the Maeotic Straits (so called because Lake Maeotis is the ancient term for the present-day Sea of Azov, also referred to above as “the Marsh”). These straits are not a major landmark in the modern world, but in the eyes of many Greeks they formed the boundary between Europe and Asia.
*40 The name that can’t be spoken is that of Thetis, a sea nymph. According to the knowledge Prometheus possesses, the son born to Zeus and Thetis would have grown to be mightier than his father. As things turned out, Thetis had a son by a mortal, Peleus, instead—the hero Achilles.
*41 Heracles, as Prometheus explains in his next speech.
*42 The Cimmerian Bosporus, the point Io’s route had reached in the previous speech of Prometheus.
*43 I follow the reading of most manuscripts; a few have “non-billowing sea” instead, the reading adopted by Griffith. In either case it is unclear what sea is meant (possibly the Caspian).
*44 An obscure place name, associated with the far East.
*45 These mythic hags are generally known as the Graeae, three white-haired women who took turns using a single eye and tooth. It is unclear why the playwright calls them “like swans in form.”
*46 Griffins were generally depicted as giant birds with lion’s claws and sharp beaks. The Arimaspians, a mythic one-eyed tribe living in the far north, were thought to rob the griffin nests of heaped-up gold and then escape on horseback from the enraged griffins.
*47 Pluto in Greek means “wealthy” and thus is usually used as an alternate name for Hades, who was thought to own all mineral wealth underground.
*48 The name, signifying “burnt-face,” shows that Io has by this point entered Africa; the Greeks were very vague as to how Asia and Africa were attached. Aethiops is perhaps here used as another name for the Nile, or else it is a purely mythical river.
*49 Unknown, but the name associates these mountains with the papyrus plant and therefore with Egypt.
*50 Dodona was situated in the far northern reaches of the Greek world, in what is today Albania. Io’s own tale of her journey from Argos (lines 669–83) took her only a short way from home before the pursuit of the gadfly sent her bounding madly northward; Prometheus now picks up that thread.
*51 Zeus supposedly gave prophecies at Dodona by way of the rustling leaves of a sacred oak.
*52 The Adriatic.
*53 After a digression on Io’s past wanderings, Prometheus here resumes the thread he left at line 815, following Io’s future arrival in Egypt.
*54 The Greek word for “touching” in line 849 is epaphon. Epaphus, the son of Io by Zeus, was identified by the Greeks with an Egyptian deity, the Apis, who had the form of a calf.
*55 The Danaids, or daughters of Danaus, whose flight from Egypt is portrayed in Aeschylus’ play Suppliants (not in this volume). They fled back to Argos to avoid a forced marriage to their fifty first cousins, but the cousins pursued them there and the marriages went forward. Still struggling to avoid incest, all fifty Danaids plotted to kill their husbands on their wedding night, but one of the fifty did not go through with the murder, and thus it was through her that Io’s line was carried on.
*56 Aphrodite.
*57 Heracles, whose rescue of Prometheus from imprisonment was portrayed in Prometheus Unbound, a lost play that probably concluded the trilogy of which Prometheus Bound was a part.
*58 This cry is usually given by warriors advancing in battle. Like the rest of Io’s speech, it is in the anapestic meter, suggesting a vigorous, agitated dance movement.
*59 The Greek text of this line is uncertain. I have adopted Page’s emendation.
*60 This is the only reference in any of our sources to a curse spoken by Cronus.
*61 It is unclear why Poseidon, too, should be attacked, except that he is Zeus’ brother and a natural ally. In a story related by Pindar, Poseidon competed with Zeus to marry Thetis, the fateful bride, but both in the end chose not to do so when they learned that the son she would bear would be stronger than themselves.
*62 See note to line 62.
*63 Referring to the downfalls of Uranus and Cronus.
*64 It seems that a line has been lost here, containing a barbed rejoinder of Prometheus.
*65 The meter changes to anapests, bringing a quicker, more urgent pace to the final speeches of the play.
SOPHOCLES
Sophocles (496/5–406/5) was the most prolific of all the tragic poets, but he also found time to serve as a public o
fficial in Athens. A genial person who was popular with his fellow citizens, he was state treasurer in 443, elected a general in 441 in the war between Athens and the island of Samos. In 411 (when he was in his eighties) he was elected one of the commissioners who arranged for Athens to be governed as an oligarchy. He won his first victory in the tragic competitions in 469/8, defeating Aeschylus. In the course of his life he won some twenty victories in the tragic competitions, and second prizes in others, but he never came in last.
According to his ancient biographers, Sophocles learned about tragedy from Aeschylus, but his style is markedly different, more compressed and less metaphorical than that of his predecessor—in his own words, “sharp and artificial”—with unusual word choice and complex structures that make his writing thought-provoking. He increased the size of the Chorus and introduced innovations in music and costuming. His seven surviving dramas all feature characters who are remarkable for their determination and inflexibility, and who (although deserving of respect and even sympathy) isolate themselves from the other characters in the dramas. Like the historian Herodotus (whom he seems to have known), he recognizes the role played by the gods in human life but prefers to concentrate on the actions of human beings, most especially on their consistent inability to recognize the limitations of their knowledge. After his death he was worshipped as a hero.
INTRODUCTION TO SOPHOCLES’ OEDIPUS THE KING
The essence of the Oedipus story is laid out in four crisp lines of Homer’s Odyssey. Oedipus’ mother, there called Epicaste (rather than, as in Sophocles’ version, Jocasta), married her son, unknowingly, after he had killed her husband, his father. “In time,” this brief sketch goes on to say, “the gods made matters known to men” (11.274). That sentence focuses our attention on the questions of ignorance and knowledge, secrecy and discovery, that must have been central to the Oedipus myth as Homer knew it. Those questions also loomed large for Sophocles as he composed the drama that, ever since Aristotle’s Poetics (written about a century after the play itself), has been anointed as the summit of perfection in the craft of Greek tragedy.
Homer’s account describes an epiphany, sudden and terrifying, in which the gods revealed to Thebes the truth of Oedipus’ condition. But Sophocles keeps the gods off the stage of his Oedipus, representing them only by indirections and implications: remembered oracles, extreme coincidences, and the dark pronouncements—fiercely rejected by Oedipus, who is not yet ready to understand—of the blind seer Tiresias. Instead, Sophocles arranges for truth to emerge slowly, piece by agonizing piece, in the way that mortals must endure when no divine revelations come to their aid. And he leaves it to a lowly shepherd, a nameless slave, to unveil the final clues to the terrible puzzle. At the start of the play, this shepherd is far from Thebes, in the high hills of Mount Cithaeron, where he tends his flocks and hides his secrets. By the end, he will have been brought to the royal palace and, as Oedipus prepares to torture the truth out of him, will speak what he knows.
The Greek Plays Page 27