‘Prometheus Bound’: a prism of the Greek enlightenment

With its message of human progress and defiance in the face of oppression, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound has inspired revolutionaries for thousands of years. In this article, Jesse Murray-Dean explores the main themes of the play, the historical context in which it was written, and the influence it has had right up to our own time.

[This article was originally published as part of issue 46 of In Defence of Marxism magazine, get your copy here]

The Ancient Greek enlightenment is among the most important periods in human history. Revolutions in politics, thought and culture broke out and intertwined in a way that had never happened before, comparable to the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries and the 18th century Enlightenment.

Athens was the epicentre of the Greek world in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, renowned for its philosophers, scientists and democrats, as well as its original new artform: drama.

When the democratic constitution was established, the Athenian theatrical festival was reorganised to become a significant component of the new democracy. The great Athenian dramatic poets created their plays with the intention of engaging with and developing the ideas in society.

The tragic drama, Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus in the 5th century BC, is emblematic of this remarkable period. The most advanced political and scientific ideas circulating in the new Athenian democracy are expressed through the most grand and spectacular of the surviving Greek tragedies.

Not only was it a great work for its time, but it has also resonated with the most progressive elements in society down the ages.

Hesiod and Aeschylus

The play’s plot draws heavily from the myth of Prometheus in the epic poems attributed to Hesiod in the 8th century BC. The Athenian audience would have been intimately familiar with Hesiod’s work, which, along with the poems of Homer, can be collectively considered the closest thing resembling a Bible of the Ancient Greeks.

In both Hesiod’s and Aeschylus’ versions, the new regime of the Olympian gods, headed by Zeus, has recently come to power by defeating the Titan army of the old gods, led by Zeus’ father, Cronus.

In this early period of Zeus’ reign, Prometheus, a Titan from the old order, steals fire from the gods and, concealing it in a fennel stalk, brings it down to humans. For this act, Zeus punished Prometheus by having him bound to the face of a cliff overlooking the sea. Since Prometheus is an immortal, he will remain here to suffer for eternity.

In Aeschylus’ hands, this material is developed in a different direction to Hesiod’s myth, putting forward an entirely new worldview.

Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days present Zeus’ victory over Cronus as the victory of order over chaos. Although Zeus is harsh and prone to anger, he is ultimately wise and just, ruling the cosmos with a firm but fair hand. Prometheus is a clever rogue, who failed at trying to outwit Zeus and faced the consequences.

Aeschylus’ Zeus, however, is an illegitimate usurper at the head of a brutal dictatorship, wielding his powers repressively and arbitrarily. Prometheus is recast as a heroic martyr, punished not for mischievous antics but for rebelling against a tyrant and saving the human race.

This political framing is as explicit as it was pertinent in contemporary Athenians. Prometheus' struggle against Zeus simultaneously echoes the class struggle that resulted in the establishment of Athenian democracy, as well as its ongoing challenges.

Zeus the tyrant

The new dramatic art form is used innovatively by Aeschylus to convey his vision. The Athenians considered him to be the first great tragic master, followed by Sophocles and then Euripides. Aristotle attributes to him the innovation of using a second actor, which greatly enhanced the role of dialogue, essentially pioneering the art.

The nature of Zeus’ regime is graphically conveyed in a harrowing opening scene depicting the binding of Prometheus. Not only are his limbs fixed to the cliff with metal clamps and chains, he is actually impaled through the chest too. He is bound at “the world's limit” to be battered by the elements for eternity.^[1]

Hephaestus, the Olympian god of blacksmithing and son of Zeus, is forced against his will to carry out this excruciating procedure under the direction of Zeus’ henchmen, Kratos and Bia, the personifications of Strength and Force respectively.

The reason for the punishment is to break Prometheus so that “he may learn to endure the sovereignty of Zeus and quit his man-loving disposition.” ^[2] The theme of rebellion against despotism, as well as the new ideas of enlightened humanism, are therefore made clear in the opening lines.

The bound Prometheus subsequently remains fixed on stage throughout the entire play, the focal point of the drama, embodying the agony of Zeus’ regime.

Dramatic movement

The play’s unambiguous political framing has been criticised by many classicists. For example, Oliver Taplin calls it “grand and empty”, stating: “It is all very well as a romantic vision of defiance against the powers of tyranny and destructiveness, but it is no good as a drama.” ^[3]

These criticisms clearly come from a class standpoint, as the play does in fact carry a highly charged dramatic movement, through which the ideas are raised.

It appears at the beginning that Prometheus is completely crushed, reduced to a picture of terrible suffering. However, over a series of episodes in which Prometheus is visited in turn by different characters, it is slowly revealed that Prometheus actually holds the key to Zeus’ downfall.

As the backstory becomes clearer, we learn that Prometheus knows of a secret prophecy that an unnamed woman, impregnated by Zeus, will give birth to a son that is more powerful than his father.

So Prometheus’ binding is not only a punishment for his crime against Zeus, but is also a means to extract the details of the prophecy under torture. If Zeus knows who the woman is, he can avoid the prophecy from happening.

Zeus' fate therefore really lies in Prometheus’ hands. This is almost certainly a unique addition by Aeschylus. As the play progresses, Prometheus becomes increasingly bold and defiant.

Almost imperceptibly, the play transforms from a picture of pain and misery to a cosmic collision between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

Prometheus unswayed

While the other characters in the play all acknowledge Zeus’ tyrannical nature, Prometheus stands alone in his opposition to it, which he retains to the end.

While the other characters in the play all acknowledge Zeus’ tyrannical nature, Prometheus stands alone in his opposition to it, which he retains to the end / Image: public domain

Ocean, the old god of the sea, now replaced in the Olympian regime by Poseidon, visits Prometheus out of sympathy. However, the advice he gives Prometheus is that of a cowardly pragmatist who has acquiesced himself to the regime. Ocean offers to broker a deal between Prometheus and Zeus, so that Prometheus can co-exist with the regime as many of the other old gods have done. However, Prometheus pours scorn on this idea.

Ocean's daughters, the Oceanids, visit Prometheus and remain with him onstage, acting as the play’s chorus, a feature of all Greek plays which consists of a group of performers who sing and dance to music, as well as interact with the other characters. While they offer pity and sympathy to Prometheus, they are crippled by fear of Zeus. They repeatedly question Prometheus’ actions and lament that nothing can change.

In the final part of the play, Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, and, in Prometheus’ words, a “lackey of the Gods”, arrives in an attempt to completely break Prometheus.^[4] He threatens that if the prophecy isn’t given up, Zeus will send a terrible storm to blast Prometheus into the mountain, from which he will be sent down into the underworld. After a long term in Tartarus, he will again be bound to the cliff – but his torture will be amplified to an even greater degree, as Zeus will send an eagle to tear out and eat Prometheus’ liver every other day, which, as he is immortal, will constantly regenerate.

Yet Prometheus remains defiant:

“… there is no disgrace in suffering

at an enemy’s hand, when you hate mutually.

So let the curling tendril of the fire

from the lightning bolt be sent against me: let

the air be stirred with thunderclaps, the winds

in savage blasts convulsing all the world.

Let earth to her foundations shake, yes, to her root,

before the quivering storm: let it confuse

the paths of heavenly stars and the sea’s waves

in a wild surging torrent: this my body

let Him raise up on high and dash it down

into black Tartarus with rigorous

compulsive eddies…” ^[5]

As promised, Zeus sends his storm, which is so strong that the sky and the sea become one. Hermes tells the chorus they should leave, lest they are caught up in the world of pain that is about to be inflicted on Prometheus. But, in a surprising turn, the chorus refuses:

“How dare you bid us practise baseness? We

will bear along with him what we must bear.

I have learned to hate all traitors: there is no

disease I spit in more than treachery.”^[6]

This final act of solidarity closes the tragedy.

The play therefore ends in a complete rejection of compromise, and boldly underlines the new virtues that had been developed by the radical democrats. Classicist Isabel Ruffell states that the play “seems to be crystallising the embryonic stages of radical democratic theory.” ^[7]

The rise of Athenian democracy

Athenian democracy was born out of a protracted period of class struggle. Over the previous two centuries there had been discontent, civil war and revolutions across the Ancient Greek world, which were termed ‘stasis’.

Only a few centuries prior, Greek society was at the stage the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan would describe as the ‘upper stage of barbarism’ – it was made up almost entirely of farmers that were socially organised into gentes and tribes.

In the 8th century BC, a wave of Greek colonisation expeditions led to the growth of trade, facilitating the development of commodity production and the new money economy. As commodities were predominantly agricultural, such as olives, wine and so on, the more well-off landowners began to get richer, appropriating the surplus produced by the labour of an increasing amount of slaves.

Class distinctions began to grow, and out of the old gentile organisation emerged early forms of the poleis, which have become known to us as ‘city-states’. In Hesiod’s time, the poleis were aristocratic, where the leading positions were monopolised by a handful of the richest landowning families.

Poor farmers became indebted to the wealthy, and these debt burdens began to spiral out of control over the following century, fuelling inequality and class resentment.

At the same time, a new class of merchants began to emerge, many of whom were not members of the aristocratic families. By the mid-7th century, feeling their growing economic weight in society, they began to challenge the hereditary rule of the aristocracy. The question of the aristocracy versus the demos – a term which encompassed everyone but the aristocats, but excluded women and slaves – was raised and grew to revolutionary proportions.

This tumultuous period exploded with the rise of the Greek Tyrants. They were individuals of various backgrounds, sometimes aristocrats and sometimes not, who usurped the political power through force and ran the state with absolute authority. Zeus is explicitly referred to as a ‘tyrant’ in the play.

These very common, albeit relatively brief, episodes of tyranny dealt blows to the aristocratic order, as well as further fueling the stasis in society. Over the 6th century BC, along with the one-man tyrannies, many aristocracies were replaced with oligarchies, where hereditary rule was replaced with that of property qualifications.

But in some city-states, the process went beyond oligarchy. In Athens, Corinth, Megara and Syracuse, the demos fought for and won full political equality for free men, irrespective of property.

In Athens, the democratic constitution was established by Cleisthenes in 508 BC. However, this was only the start of a long series of reforms that extended democracy and attacked the aristocracy over the next two centuries.

But even after the victory of the demos, the aristocrats were still very much present and were always eager to take back the reins.

Athens was also surrounded on all sides by powerful states hostile to democracy, most notably Sparta and the despotic Persian Empire.

Prometheus Bound is part of the struggle against any political backsliding. The play draws a clear line between democratic values and any elements of tyranny – not only the phenomenon of the Greek Tyrants, but all the restrictions on political rights that the aristocrats and oligarchs were arguing for.

The revolutionary ideals that had been developed over the course of this struggle are defended in the play by embodying them in the heroic character of Prometheus. But the play goes beyond merely a defence of Athenian democratic ideals – it ties them together with, and makes them an integral part of, an entirely new, materialist worldview.

The Greek enlightenment

Only 100 years before Prometheus Bound, in the 6th century BC, philosophy was born in the Greek city-state of Miletus, located in modern-day Turkey. Here began the first attempts at rationally understanding nature on its own terms, without recourse to myths and gods.

Alongside the development of philosophical materialism, new spheres of science rapidly opened up across the Greek world / Image: public domain

The Milesian philosophers started with the question of the origin and makeup of the universe. Alongside the development of philosophical materialism, new spheres of science rapidly opened up across the Greek world. Biology, natural history, mechanics, meteorology, cartography, geology and medicine were all put on a scientific footing.

With the rise of democracy towards the end of the 6th century BC, the new ways of thinking that were developed with the study of nature were now applied to social questions. Politics, morality, history, linguistics and logic became fields of study.

Such a blossoming of science and culture was the product of a society based on slavery, which allowed a layer to dedicate itself to intellectual activities, thus unleashing an unprecedented development of the productive forces, technology and culture.

Prometheus Bound brings all these new and developing ideas together in a dramatic unity.

Hesiod’s ‘fall of man’

We can see how Aeschylus does this by once again comparing his play to Hesiod’s poems. In Hesiod, Cronus presided over the ‘golden age’ of man – literally ‘man' as there were no women. Men lived in a state of divine bliss, free from suffering and labour:

"… just like gods they spent their lives with a spirit free from care, entirely apart from toil and distress. […] the grain-giving field bore crops of its own accord, much and unstinting…”^[8]

The end of idyllic existence was not instigated with the coming to power of Zeus, but afterwards, by the foolishness of Prometheus.

After Zeus comes to power, Prometheus is assigned the task overseeing how man’s sacrifices to the gods will take place. Hesiod’s Prometheus is a cunning trickster, and he finds a way to cheat Zeus and the Olympians out of the best portions of sacrificial meat. In retaliation, Zeus takes fire away from mankind, but Prometheus steals it back and returns it to man, for which Prometheus is punished.

To punish man for their complicity in this crime, Zeus creates the first woman, Pandora:

“… he had contrived this beautiful evil thing in exchange for that good one [fire] […] For from her comes the race of female women: for of her is the deadly race and tribe of women, a great woe for mortals…” ^[9]

Zeus then concocted a jar full of evils, which Pandora opened, setting loose all the ills to henceforth plague mankind.

Thus began humanity’s degeneration through successive stages, culminating in the ‘iron age’, corresponding to Hesiod’s times, where men “will not cease from toil and distress by day, nor from being worn out by suffering at night, and the gods will give them grievous cares.”^[10]

Ode to human progress

Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound puts forward the opposite view. Rather than man falling from grace, human beings (the gendered, ‘Pandora’ element of Hesiod is absent) lived not only a harder life in the past, but actually originally led an animal existence, enslaved entirely to the forces of nature. In this version, it is the gift of fire from Prometheus that instigated the unceasing and unbounded development of humanity and its power over nature

In one of the most famous odes in poetry, Prometheus lists the milestones of human progress in chronological order, that all originated with his gift of fire.

First of all, he explains that humans did not always possess consciousness. Before fire, we lived like the other beasts of Earth, unable to understand or influence our environment:

“… I found [humans] mindless

and gave them minds,

made them masters of their wits. […]

First they had eyes but could not see,

and ears but heard not. Like shapes within a dream

they dragged through their long lives and muddled all,

haphazardly…”^[11]

Prometheus then describes our upwards development instigated by the gift of fire. First we learned to understand the cycle of the seasons, allowing the development of agriculture. Prometheus then lists mathematics, language, the domestication of animals, medicine, shipping and mining, the last two being especially important in contemporary Athens, which possessed a naval empire and lucrative mines.

He ends with: “every art of man comes from Prometheus”.^[12] But it must be remembered that Prometheus only gave us the gifts of fire and hope, after which he was punished and did not intervene further, as he explains earlier in the play:

“I hunted out the secret spring of fire

that filled the narthex stem, which when revealed

became the teacher of each craft to men,

a great resource. This is the sin committed

for which I stand accountant, and I pay

nailed in my chains under the open sky.”^[13]

After the initial impulse from the Titan, there are no supernatural forces involved. It is only humans and nature, and our improvements stem from our advancement of technology and, simultaneously, our mental faculties. The play therefore puts forward a materialist explanation of the development of early human beings out of the animal kingdom and into civilisation.

These ideas were in circulation at the time in various forms. For example, the 6th century BC Milesian philosopher Anaximander put forward the idea that humans, and all animals, evolved from fish. The 5/6th century BC philosopher Xenophanes advanced an atheistic view of human development: “By no means did the gods intimate all things to mortals from the beginning, but in time, inquiring, they discover better.”^[14]

The play may also be echoing, or itself be the influence of, the view of the 5th century philosopher Anaxagoras that the development of the human hands are “the cause of man being of all animals the most intelligent”. ^[15] This profound insight into the dialectical relation between the mind and body in human evolution has since been demonstrated by modern science in the last century.

There are many more points of comparison between the views in the play and contemporary ideas in philosophy and natural science. And by putting these ideas forward in a mythological dramatic form, the play actually provides something original, developing these ideas by synthesising them together in a holistic unity.

The art of symbolism allows philosophical, political and cultural ideas to be embodied in the various components of the play, and through the medium of drama, these ideas can then be made to interact, clash and combine with one another.

For example, fire likely symbolised the concept the Ancient Greeks called ‘techne’, broadly encompassing the act, skill or art of practice, craft or production.

The figure of Prometheus is often thought to symbolise techne. However, as we shall see, Aeschylus’ Prometheus doesn’t embody one aspect of the human intellect, but the human condition as a whole.

‘Blind hope’

Prometheus actually bestows a second gift to humans: ‘blind hope’. This sounds like quite a negative thing, however, it’s explained in the play that in the age of Cronus, humans used to know when they would die. The gift of ‘blind hope’ took away this knowledge. The Oceanids agree that this is a great gift indeed, as if you don’t know when you’re going to die, then you actually have a reason to try and improve your circumstances.

This is also another twist on Hesiod’s version. In a rather convoluted part of his Pandora myth, hope was included in the jar of evils for man. But when the jar was opened, and all the evils escaped to plague man, hope got stuck in the jar and did not escape, leaving them ‘hopeless’.

Aeschylus’ Prometheus, however, endows humanity with hope, apparently symbolising both optimism for the future as well the faculties of abstract thought.

On the one hand, the twin gifts of fire and hope are the kernel of all human progress – our means and motive for elevating our lives. In this sense, ‘hope’ embodies our self-will and striving to better our lives.

On the other hand, by ‘blinding' our divine knowledge of the future, we are now forced to predict the future ourselves, developing our ability to reason. The Ancient Greeks used the term ‘nous’ to broadly encompass rational thought, understanding, abstraction, conceptualisation, and so on.

Therefore, Prometheus, with his ‘gifts’ of hope and fire, represents our humanity in all its aspects – nous and techne, reason and practice, science and art, feeling and thought.

Dialectical unity

Prometheus’ ode to human progress is not an interesting tangent to the poem, but is central to it, adding a much broader dimension to the political theme expressed in Prometheus’ struggle against Zeus.

The play puts forward the view that all aspects of human society were born through struggle, and have developed through struggle.

Zeus encapsulates all the fetters on human society, while Prometheus represents our creative spirit, forward drive and optimism in the struggle against these social fetters as well as the forces of nature.

A dialectical view of change unites all the themes together. But it is not a view of random, chaotic change; rather it is one of creative change in an upward, progressive direction.

Prometheus prophesies what appears to be unimaginable, that the present state of affairs will transform into its opposite:

“So, in his crashing fall shall Zeus discover

how different are rule and slavery.”^[16]

This notion of a universe in constant flux, driven by struggle, is reminiscent of the ideas of the 6th century BC philosopher Heraclitus, the father of dialectics. In one fragment, he says:

“Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away.”^[17]

This conception of change and contradiction (‘strife’) as being inseparable from reality is a profound truth, and is clearly expressed from multiple angles in Prometheus Bound. Aeschylus fills this dialectical worldview with the new political and scientific ideas that developed since Heraclitus’ time.

Revolutionary spirit

Prometheus Bound is widely considered to have been part of a trilogy, like Aeschylus’ Oresteia, although the other two plays have sadly been lost. However, considering what we know about Aeschylus’ other works, and the nature of Athenian society at the time, it is likely that the final part would see Prometheus and Zeus somehow reconciled together.

For Marx, it is no longer simply nature or political tyranny, but the laws of the capitalist system itself that oppress humanity / Image: public domain

It must be remembered that democratic Athens still remained a class society. The citizen body was in fact a minority of the population. Only Athenian men were citizens – foreigners, slaves and all Athenian women had no political rights. The citizen body itself was also divided along class lines. While there was political equality for all citizens, there was no pretence of economic equality.

It is therefore likely that a layer of richer democrats did not want further stasis. The revolutionary struggle for democracy had been necessary and heroic, but now it was necessary for everyone to calm down and get to work. The compromise concluding the so-called Prometheia trilogy would therefore reflect this mood.

However, Prometheus Bound itself doesn’t reveal much of the conservative side in Athenian society. Although the play is very much the product of a particular time and place, its bold championing of rebellion, freedom, human progress and enlightenment have reached far beyond Athens in the 5th century BC.

Aeschylus’ Prometheus resonated powerfully with artists and radicals in the age of democratic revolutions across Europe.

Percy Shelley, the revolutionary English Romantic poet, wrote his own sequel to Prometheus Bound, called Prometheus Unbound, in which there is no compromise, and we see the end of the reign of Jupiter (the Roman name of Zeus). In the preface to his poem, he sums up the mood amongst this young and optimistic layer of artists:

“… I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. […] Prometheus is, as it were, the type of highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best noblest ends.”^[18]

The young Goethe took up many of the ideas in Prometheus Bound, and even wrote a poem entitled Prometheus, which can best be described as a clarion call to atheism. Beethoven composed The Creatures of Prometheus, a ballet championing the journey of the human race towards enlightenment.

Karl Marx was also inspired by the play. He cites Aeschylus as his favourite poet, and refers to Prometheus several times throughout his work. In his masterpiece, Capital, Marx writes that capitalist production “rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan [the Roman name of Hephaestus] did Prometheus to the rock.”^[19]

What is particularly interesting here is that, for Marx, it is no longer simply nature or political tyranny, but the laws of the capitalist system itself that oppress humanity. However, it is this tyranny that drives the struggle of the working class towards its overthrow.

Prometheus today

Today, the ideas in the play have been distorted by cynical and pessimistic academics, particularly on the so-called ‘left’, who use the term ‘Prometheanism’ to refer derisively to a naive faith in revolution or in science. This is nothing more than an expression of petty-bourgeois impotence in the epoch of capitalism’s senile decay.

In fact, the working class has inherited the Promethean struggle that has been waged by the oppressed against their oppressors throughout history.

Capitalism is not only a barrier on production, it is also a fetter on culture, philosophy, science and human development as a whole. Along with an abundance of material resources, technology and so on, there also exists an enormously rich heritage of ideas, art and culture developed by human beings over centuries.

Just as with the Ancient Greeks’ struggle against the aristocrats and the bourgeois radicals’ struggle against the feudal lords, the struggle of the working class against capitalism is bound up with a new enlightenment.

And by taking over the immense productive forces that have been built up by capitalism, the working class can put humanity on the road to true freedom for the first time.

References

[1] Aeschylus, ‘Prometheus Bound’, The Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus, Vol. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1991, pg 139, henceforth referred to as PB

[2] ibid.

[3] O Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oxford University Press, 1977, pg 467

[4] PB, pg 175

[5] ibid., pg 179

[6] ibid.

[7] I A Ruffell, Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound, Bristol Classics Press, 2012, pg 57

[8] Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, Harvard University Press, 2006, pg 97

[9] ibid., pg 51

[10] ibid., pg 103

[11] PB, pg 115-6

[12] ibid., pg 157

[13] ibid., pg 143

[14] Quoted in P Curd (ed.), A Presocratics Reader, Hackett, 2011, pg 34

[15] Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1882, pg 117

[16] PB, pg 173

[17] Quoted in J Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, Adam and Charles Black, 1908, pg 150

[18] P B Shelley, Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and Other Poems, Collins, 1970, pg 63-64

[19] K Marx, ‘Capital’, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35, Lawrence and Wishart, 1975, pg 639-640