Aeschylus (Part 5)

(Pictured: Aeschylus and his actors.) We here present the final part (Part 5) of the Introduction written by P. E. More for his translation of the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, published in 1899. We have returned to our category Poetry and the Classical Tradition after having completed our presentation of More’s essay on one of the most subjective and unclassical of authors, James Joyce. Paul Elmer More (1864-1937) was an American journalist, critic, essayist, and Christian apologist. He collaborated with Irving Babbitt from before 1900 in the project later called the New Humanism. His conservative literary criticism was published in the eleven-volume Shelburne Essays (1904-1921) and the three-volume New Shelburne Essays (1928). He also published several books on Plato and Greek philosophy, including the Greek Tradition. Late in his life he undertook Christian apologetics, notably in The Christ of the Testament. On Being Human was published in 1936.

The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus
By Paul Elmer More

Introduction

The Significance of the Play

Several questions naturally arise in regard to the Prometheus: What is the origin of the
myth? what did it signify to Aeschylus? how did he regard the character of Zeus?

The procuring of fire, the red flower, as Kipling has so graphically called it, has given rise to innumerable myths all over the world, and in several countries has become an important part of religious belief and ceremony. Among the Hindus especially, the kindling of fire for the sacrifice by twirling one stick upon another was regarded as a most holy rite. To them the home of fire was the sky; the flame of the lightning was brought down to earth by the rain, and so lay concealed in the sap of plants, whence it was evoked by friction. In the burning of the oblation, the flames aspiring to their celestial home carried with them the offering of mankind to the gods. The stick twirled by the priest was called pramanthas, the rubber, and it has been asserted that prometheus is but the Greek form of this same word, and that the legend of the fire-stealing Titan is merely an allegory of the old Vedic ceremony. Opinion has recently changed on this point, however, and it is now generally believed that the word prometheus is from quite another root and means, as the Greeks themselves maintained, the foreknower or contriver. Yet for all that the Greek legend may well be a modification of the same myth of the descent of fire so religiously cherished by their cousins, the Hindus.

The Prometheus Bound cannot, I think, be reckoned among the most perfect of Greek tragedies, or even as the best work of Aeschylus: its interest is too far removed from human nature, it is too fantastic for that; and yet the poet has succeeded in imbuing the drama with certain haunting ideas, half expressed and half veiled in allegory, which have been the admiration and perplexity of succeeding generations of men.

The conceptions both of progress and degeneration were common to the ancients, and these two notions meet in the Prometheus in a manner somewhat bewildering to the reader. The old mythical idea of the fall of mankind, familiar to us from the book of Genesis, was widespread among the Greeks. Its embodiment in the legend of the four ages, the golden, silver, bronze, and iron, was made popular in Greece by the poet Hesiod, who laments so bitterly that he was born in this age of iron when “men cease not from labor and misery, neither by day nor night, wasting away in sorrow.” But together with this gloomy view of life grew up another, that found in the toils of mankind a slow striving after a better state. Virgil, in the Georgics, has presented both views side by side and reconciled them for himself. “All earthly things,” he says, “are doomed to fall away and slip back into chaos, like a boatman who is just managing to make head against the stream, if the tension of his arms happens to relax, and the current whirls away the boat headlong down the river’s bed.” “The father himself willed that the way of the laborer should be hard . . . sharpening the hearts of mankind by cares.” The tendency of the world is ever backward toward chaos, but in man resides a power, his will, which may lead him always to a higher state. “Stern labor has conquered all things.”

Of all the classic authors Lucretius has spoken with the surest note. He has given us a description of the gradual development and civilization of mankind which has never been surpassed for graphic force. His account of the early state of men affords an interesting parallel to the picture presented by Aeschylus. “But the race of mankind then in the fields was much hardier, as beseemed it to be, since the earth had produced it; and built on a groundwork of larger and more solid bones within. . . . Among acorn-bearing oaks they would refresh their bodies for the most part; and the arbute-berries which you now see in the winter-time ripen with a bright scarlet hue, the earth would then bear in greatest plenty and of a larger size. . . . But rivers and springs invited to slake thirst, even as now a rush of water down from the great hills summons with clear plash far and wide the thirsty races of wild beasts. Then too as they ranged about they would occupy the well-known woodland haunts of the nymphs, out of which they knew that smooth-gliding streams of water with a copious gush bathed the dripping rocks, the dripping rocks, trickling down over the green moss; and in parts welled and bubbled out over the level plain. And as yet they knew not how to apply fire to their purposes or to make use of skins and clothe their body in the spoils of wild beasts, but they would dwell in woods and mountain-caves and forests and shelter in the brushwood their squalid limbs when driven to shun the buffeting of the winds and the rain.” Thereupon follows the story of man’s rise, the building of huts and invention of clothes, the finding of fire, the growth of language, the gradual development of the arts and sciences. In one respect only his picture of primitive man is quite different from the account in the Prometheus. The savage of Lucretius is free and strong, a true animal of nature; Aeschylus thinks of him as subject to all the infirmities of civilization without the compensating art of healing.

The conception of progress, not through labor and will-power as Virgil understood it, but rather through the intellectual faculties, underlies in the Prometheus the fable of the stealing of fire. The opposite conception takes on a form so peculiar to Greece that some explanation of its meaning may be demanded.

The commonest and most binding law of conduct for the Greek was expressed in the saying Nothing too much. This was that law of moderation and harmony which they held to be as important in the offices of life as in the productions of art. And this law, when raised into the sphere of religion, became embodied in the peculiarly Greek dread of the Divine Envy. Man as a mortal should think as a mortal; any act that raises him beyond his proper realm is a revolt against that order of things which Aeschylus calls “the harmony of Zeus;” and his transgression of the bounds is punished by Nemesis or the avenging Furies. I have called this dread of the divine envy peculiarly Greek; but this is true of its form only, for the same innate fear of a jealous God is common among savages, is expressed in the Hebrew story of the fall of man, underlies the Christian doctrine of the atonement, and may in fact be deemed one of the universal ideas of the race born from a long and painful struggle with the thwarting circumstances of nature. Now it is this same notion of the divine envy that Aeschylus has expressed in the allegory of Zeus and Prometheus. Zeus would thrust mankind back into darkness, fearing lest they should grow strong and conspire against his throne, as he in his time had conspired against Cronos; whereas Prometheus is a symbol of the upward striving force in mankind. But it must not be supposed that Aeschylus was consciously dealing in allegory. There was in his mind something of the primitive mytho-poetic power of the early ages, and his ideas were only half abstracted from the concrete forms they had assumed in mythology. He had in fact to a high degree the formative sense that must always accompany poetic genius.

Critics have been troubled at the position of Zeus in this play. How did Aeschylus reconcile the god’s vindictive cruelty with the belief he elsewhere so strongly avows in the justice of Zeus? I think we must simply accept the difficulty. The Greeks beheld the cruelty of life with unblenching vision; Nemesis awaited those who climbed too high even by force of their virtues. They also had a firm belief in the divine harmony of the world and in the justice of God. Aeschylus did not attempt in the Prometheus Unbound any metaphysical reconciliation of these opposing views; nor has the wit of man through thousands of years found the solution of this mystery. The guilty and the innocent suffer to-day as they did in the age of Aeschylus. We can only, as the Greek did before us, make sure that happiness so far as it lies under our own control must come from adjusting our lives to a belief in the world’s harmony and justice, and from an unshaken though inexplicable conviction that somehow “Zeus bringeth mortal men on the way of knowledge, having made good the law that wisdom comes through suffering.”

It is perhaps chiefly through this notion of “wisdom by suffering” symbolized in the torture of the Titan champion of mankind, that the Prometheus has taken such a strong hold on the sympathy of the Christian world. The long and hardly learned lesson of humanity is here presented to us in the form of a divine tragedy, and even the fanatic Tertullian did not hesitate to compare the story of the Titan with the sufferings of Christ; no one to-day, I think, can read this strange drama without feeling that more is meant than meets the eye, and that in it lie prefigured, dimly and unconsciously, much that the world was to learn and endure. Many modern poets have been haunted by the spell of this old Greek poem. Milton drew inspiration from this source for his Satan; Goethe began a drama on the same subject, which however he never finished; Byron acknowledged his indebtedness to Aeschylus for his Manfred; and Shelley has attempted to replace the lost Prometheus Unbound by a drama of the same name indeed, but instinct with romantic and it must be confessed somewhat crude ideas. But for simplicity and grandeur and haunting suggestiveness the work of Aeschylus still wears the crown bestowed on it by the Athenian people.

[The end.]