Aeschylus

“ Wherewith thou art exercised as now, a jest.
Nay, poor my friend, let not these heats possess thee;
Rail not against thy lot but seek to mend it.
A threadbare wisdom mine may chance be rated:
So be it: only see, Prometheus, what are
The wages of a tongue that speaks great things.
But thou not yet art chasten'd, stiff as ever, 320
And goest about to add new woes to old.
Nay, nay, if I may be thy teacher, never
Shalt thou lift heel against the pricks; for, look,
One rules, who spares not, lord without compeer,
And none can say to him, "What doest thou?" ”

“ Io
⁠Tell me,
Is there for him no conjuring of such peril?
PROMETHEUS
I only might, if one should loose my hands;
None else. 770
Io
⁠Nay, who is he shall loose thee, maugre
The will of Zeus?
PROMETHEUS
⁠One of thy body sprung
Must be the looser.
Io
⁠Ah! what word is this?
My son, thou say'st, shall lift thy burden from thee?
PROMETHEUS
Let generations ten go by: thereto
Add other three.
Io
⁠The rede oracular
Grows darker, hard to construe.
PROMETHEUS
⁠Also I bid thee
Into thine own woes make not inquisition. ”

“ Thou hast seen man's dark estate, wherein he is tied and bound,
A little strength without sap, the stuff of a dream: for when 550
⁠Shall wit of man prevent
⁠God's well-knit regiment?
Such thought in my heart, Prometheus, doth sight of thy ruin move:
And it leaps to my mind how far is this from the strain I sang
In the day of thy marriage feast, by the lavers and bed of love,
The song of the bringing home of Hesione, that sprang
⁠Of mine own father, bride
⁠Gift-gotten to thy side. 560
Io, in form half-woman, half-cow, comes in, wandering. ”

“ Bears well that thou shalt presently behold
These chains unbolted and thyself in power
No whit inferior to Zeus. 510
PROMETHEUS
⁠Not yet
Lies in the scope of all-dispensing doom
That consummation: first with thousand throes
And aches must I be plied, ere loosing come.
Strong truly is craft, but stronger far is Fate.
CHORUS
And of strong Fate who has the helm, and steers?
PROMETHEUS
The Three Weird Queens, the Avengers who forget not.
CHORUS
And Zeus, thou say'st, is less in might than these?
PROMETHEUS
Whatso stands written Zeus cannot escape. ”

“ Is nothing feign'd, but spoken home and surely.
The high God's mouth knows not to speak the thing
That false is, but shall stablish all. Thou then
Look narrowly, take thought, and never deem
Advisedness of lesser praise than pride.
CHORUS
To us the words of Hermes have some show
Of reason, bidding thee remit thy pride,
To explore the sage path of advisedness.
Be ruled: the wise get shame, who go astray.
PROMETHEUS
Or ever his lips had let it go, 1040
I knew his burden: that foe of foe
⁠Should suffer evil is no new law. ”

“ Thou shalt know this is verity: not my way
Is it worship to lavish of lips, for say,
How best should I stead thee? truer lover
Than Okeanos hope not at all to discover,
⁠More prompt to attend thy pleasure.
PROMETHEUS.
Ah now! what thing is this? art thou too come
To spy my pains? how foundest heart, forsaking
Thy namesake flood, thy caves of archèd rock, 300
Unhewn of hand, to visit earth, the world
Whose womb is great with iron? Is it to view
My passion? to bear part in my distresses? ”

“ So shalt thou tread
Europe no more, but thence the continent
Asia.
⁠Look now, and tell me whether to you
He seems, this tyrant of the gods, a nature
Violent or no? or in a sole respect,
And not in all? Consider: a god is he,
And purposing to enjoy in way of love
This daughter of men, hath laid on her such tale
Of wayfarings. Bitter indeed, O maiden,
Thy suitor is, that woos thee; for be sure 740
The things thou hast heard are scarce the prelude yet.
[Io breaks into lamentable cries.]
Lo there thou criest again; thy breath comes hard
With travail of thy soul. ”

“ The Father's thunderbolt and fiery flaw
Shall rend asunder, and thy living body
Earth shall entomb: a rock shall be the arm
To bear thee up. Then, when thou hast outworn 1020
Great length of days, thou shalt be brought again
Into the light by doom reversed; and straight
The wingèd dog of Zeus, the tawny eagle,
Shall make thy flesh but a great rag to tear,
To ravin piecemeal, constant to his hour,
A guest unbidden, steadfast all day long,
Gorging thy liver, banquet black and rich. ”

“ It is inconceivable, for instance, that there will ever be an age of English literature to correspond more nearly with that of the Attic drama than the Elizabethan.
To hand down translations may seem too poor a mark for the ambition of the age. And yet the Book, which has been the most powerful force in English literature, is a translation. In the case of the Greek poets, how much of our intellectual heritage comes from them, even though all the while a strange tongue has had to be mastered in order to know them, no one needs to be reminded. ”

“ But thee I look upon and thrill,
⁠By thousand torments marr'd!
I Because not holding Zeus in awe,
But taking thine own will for law,
⁠Thou renderest regard
⁠To children of the dust,
⁠Prometheus, more than just.
Nay look, O friend, and declare, is there grace that thy grace hath found?
Is anywhere power to save? is there help in perishing men? ”

“ Aught left of anguish, that thou hast not told?
PROMETHEUS
Sore weathering of a sea of wreckful woe.
Io
What gain to live then? Wherefore have I not
Long since leapt headlong from this iron crag,
That hurtling so to earth, I might have done
With all my labours? Better once to die 750
Than always every morrow taste fresh pain!
PROMETHEUS
Good sooth, not easily would'st thou support
Such load as mine, whom fate debars from death;—
That were indeed to find deliverance.
Now, as things are, my travail sees proposed
No end, till Zeus be throned in heaven no more.
Io
What! ”

“ Hail'd thee, not darkly, spouse of Zeus Most High
To be, if to thine ear such name come kindly,—
Thence thy tormentor prick'd thee on to fly
The way of the sea to that great Gulf of Rhea,
Wherefrom again thou art beaten back, storm-driven
In course ungovern'd. Know in time to come
That salt sea firth shall be Ionian call'd, 840
Eternal record of thy transient feet.
These signs I give thee of my heart's discernment,
That further it pierces than the eye can see. ”

“ PROMETHEUS
Sick may I be, if to hate foes be sickness!
HERMES
Ha, in good health thou would'st no more be borne.
PROMETHEUS
Oh! oh!
HERMES
The lips of Zeus have never learnt that sound. 980
PROMETHEUS
Nought is, time shall not teach, that groweth full of days. ”

“ Must bear: and thou, O seed of Inachos,
Hide in thy heart my words, that thou may'st learn
The issues of thy way.
⁠From this rock first
Set thou thy face toward the East, and tread
Fields no man ever plough'd, until thou reach
The roving Scythians, them that have their homes
Woven, uplift from earth, on running wheels, 710
Men that bear bows and find far quarry: these
Approach not near, but ever keep thy steps
Hard by the reefs that break the thundering sea,
And so pass that land through. ”

“ Alas, Prometheus! for thy pains I groan.
KRATOS
Yes, thou art soft, and for the foes of Zeus
Groanest: thou yet may'st need thy pity at home.
HEPHAISTOS
Thou see'st a sight not good to look upon. ”

“ I will resolve thee all thy heart would know,
Not with dark circumstance, but words full plain, 610
As right would, friend should open mouth to friend.
Thou see'st Prometheus, him that gave men fire. ”

“ It is as if one should attempt to scale a mountain by making a rush at it, without looking for the path. By observing the path, a less powerful climber may perhaps arrive higher.
The effect of a foreign original can only be given by a style which suggests that which most nearly corresponds to it in our own literature. Now we have in English literature, as well as in Greek, a great age of poetic drama, the time of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, and the best of this drama is by theory part of the furniture of every educated Englishman's mind. ”

“ With the blinding, shattering surges.
[Io goes out, raving.]
CHORUS
⁠Him wise I call, him wise attest,
⁠Whose bosom first with this was great,
⁠And whose tongue publish'd it: "They best
⁠Do wed, that match their own estate. 890
⁠Let not the toil-engrainèd hands
⁠Lust to embrace in spousal bands
⁠Them that above the general crowd
High breed exalts, or wealth makes delicate and proud."
⁠May never day for me appear,
⁠Never for me, O Queens of Doom,
⁠To come the bed of God anear,
⁠Or get of them on high for groom! ”

“ Perhaps he was also following the Athenian tradition in making Prometheus her son. At any rate, his poetical purpose was advanced by removing the colourless Iapetos and Klymene, and allowing no parent to appear for the person who embodies the idea of Wisdom, but the ancient, wise, universal Mother herself.
We may digress for a moment from Prometheus to speak of his mother. The ideas of the Earth and of Justice (Themis) seem at first so far apart that one might wonder how they could coalesce. But Themis is not primarily goddess of justice: she is primarily an oracular power. ”

“ Mouth of the pest, I rush'd, with furious leaping,
To drinking-pools of the Kerchneian stream,
The fount of Lerna. And there clave to me
A bitter herdsman, gall untemper'd, Argos,
Prodigious growth of the ground, fill'd full of eyes,
And dogg'd my goings. But him a sudden hand, 680
He look'd not for, cut off; and me, sting-fretted,
Drives yet from land to land the scourge of God.
Thou hast the tale of things thus far: the travail
Remaining, if thou canst, declare ”

“ Comes anguish, when with brass not lightly loosed
I pin thee to this hill, remote from men, 20
Where thou no voice, no human lineament
Shalt see, but broiling in the sun's fierce brightness
Shalt change thy favour, hailing still the hour,
When spangle-vestured Night shall veil the light,
And that, when Day dispels the early rime.
Yea, every hour, being present, shall be pain
To wear thee:—the deliverer is not yet.
Such harvest dost thou reap from love of men. ”

“ But we, whose thoughts have been so multiplied and who speak with so many tongues, are in a position, as our fathers were not, to realise to what elements in our own speech, to what stage of our own past, the language and thoughts of each epoch of antiquity correspond, and, realising this, to give the great works of antiquity a rendering which, if sometimes suffering from the defects of a compromise, is absolutely the best possible. ”

“ In the Elizabethan drama there is much that is deficient in universality, that calls up ruffled collars and pointed beards—verbal conceits, ephemeral mannerisms. The Hebraic language of the Bible is too primitive, to say nothing of its dearth of adjectives, to render the more complex and various language of Greek poetry. ”

“ Where Hephaistos is sympathetic and sorrowful, Hermes preaches and exults. In one way this scene would appeal to an ancient spectator as it does no longer to a modern reader. Hermes was the patron and typical rep esentative of a class with which he was familiar—the class of heralds. And the qualities shown by Hermes on this occasion are just those for which heralds were unpopular: they had the insolence of flunkeys; their office was considered one unworthy of a free man, while the haughtiness and brutality, with which they exercised it, made them detested. ”

“ Whether it be great in creation or not, it certainly displays a variety of imitative manner greater than any other age can show. Arising mainly perhaps from that widening and suppling of the historic imagination, which makes it more possible for us to live in thought under all sorts of different conditions than it has been to the people of other times, an unprecedented power of eclectic reproduction belongs to modern literature. ”

“ Whether any one who aims at writing the English of the Elizabethan and Miltonic age succeeds in getting beyond this feeble reproduction and in really catching the manner of his models, only those acquainted with the models themselves can judge. ”

“ While, for instance, in Aeschylus Zeus is simply said to have "taken no account" of mankind on his accession to power, and to have regarded them rather as rubbish than with any active hostility, in Hesiod a set quarrel between Zeus and Man is traced to the fraud which men, as instructed by Prometheus, had perpetrated upon the gods in the matter of sacrifice. The somewhat low cunning, which Prometheus displays in that episode, could only have misrepresented that subtlety of wit which Aeschylus meant his Prometheus to embody. ”

“ If modernisms be forbidden him, how is he to enrich and invigorate his language except by opening freely its original springs, and letting into it even words and forms of speech, which have been dropped by the current poetical tradition? ”

“ But this is so less and less, and if democracy is destined to lay hold of literature, as of everything else, that generation will have made no mean contribution, which delivers to the people a standard rendering of the great works upon which our own literature has been nourished. ”

“ The test of love, truth; sole philosopher;
For all besides are sophists!"Childe Harold, Canto 4.
Note 25. Page 62.
In vain thou chafest me with exhortation,
As waves the rock.
Gataker, in his annotations on Marcus Antoninus, has many interesting observations on this idea, which he traces up to Homer. Elmsley and Blomfield endeavour to turn the wave into Prometheus instead of into Mercury; and against Morell and Butler, and the disciples of Apostolius. It is a poetical, not a grammatical question; and I cannot help thinking that poetry decides as my translation has done. ”

“ His wisdom, then, is one of the three characteristics of Prometheus, which Aeschylus has taken from the old myth and expanded. And this he has also done with the other two, love of men and defiance of the new gods. Already in Hesiod, Prometheus is a "kindly" god. (ἀκάκητα Προμηθεύς. Theog. 614.) He schemes to secure the good part of the sacrifice for men. He steals fire for men. But he is not yet the universal benefactor, the one moved always with a divine compassion, who because of his great love for men drew wittingly upon himself the wrath of God. ”

“ There was a great mountain called Caucasus in the East, there were people called Arabs in the East; that was quite enough for Aeschylus. As a matter of fact, we must remember that the uncultivated land to the South of the Armenian mountain-system (whose foot-hills constitute Mesopotamia) was part of the Arab domain, and that the term Caucasus might easily have been extended over Armenia.
Line 431. The description of the mourning of inanimate nature is usually connected with the reference to Atlas. It seems more naturally to follow on the description of the mourning of mankind for Prometheus. ”

“ Erfurdt has justly observed, that the Greek poets have called the most fearful monsters dogs. In this place griffins are called dogs; a little further on, and in the Agamemnon, eagles are called dogs; in the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, the sphinx is called a dog; in the Hercules Furens of Euripides, the hydra is called a dog; in the Electra, both of Sophocles and Euripides, the Furies are called dogs; in Apollonius Rhodius, the Harpies are called dogs; in the Andromache of Euripides, (what a climax!) a woman is called a dog ”

“ In Hesiod, however, it is not further explained in what way Prometheus disclosed his shrewdness beyond his attempt to cheat Zeus in the sacrifice, his warning to Epimetheus not to receive the gifts of the gods, and his successful theft of the fire. In Aeschylus on the other hand all human invention, all ways of fitting means to ends, go back to Prometheus. "All arts men have from the Provider come" (l. 506) . He has become almost a personification of human intelligence, of human craft, in vain war with the greater powers. ”