Prometheus Bound

Prometheus’s confrontation with Hermes highlights Zeus’s tyrannical abuse of power and the severity of Prometheus’s punishment. Finally, after being warned again and again that Zeus can make his punishment even worse than it already is, Hermes’s arrival confirms that Zeus is in fact threatening to compound Prometheus’s suffering if he does not end his defiance. Specifically, Zeus demands to know “what marriage of his is this […] / that shall drive him from power” (947-48). Zeus wishes to avoid his fate—and wants Prometheus to tell him how to do so.

Here at last we see the limits of Zeus’s power—and the trap that his tyranny has created for him. Zeus is fated to fall, and only Prometheus has the knowledge to prevent this from happening. This means that Zeus is effectively in Prometheus’s power, even if he does not realize it yet. Zeus can threaten Prometheus and make him suffer The Consequences of Defying Tyranny, but he cannot make Prometheus tell him what he knows: Prometheus’s mind remains free. As Prometheus tells Hermes, “[t]here’s not / a torture or device of any kind” that can make him reveal what he knows. In other words, Zeus has no power over Prometheus. Since Prometheus is immortal, Zeus cannot even kill him, only hurt him—and Prometheus, knowing this, resolves to endure everything that Zeus throws at him. Prometheus’s defiance thus sends an important message to the tyrant, demonstrating that savagery and cruelty cannot overcome a free mind. When Zeus sees this, Prometheus declares, he will finally understand the limits of his power and “in his crashing fall shall […] discover / how far apart are rule and slavery” (926-27).

The final episode of Prometheus Bound makes it clear how much freer Prometheus is than the other characters of the play, even in his confinement. Because Prometheus refuses to bow to a ruler who is not just, he retains control over his mind and is undefeated even by his horrific punishments. As Prometheus says to the Chorus, all Zeus can do is threaten him with suffering—but because this suffering is destined to someday end, Prometheus does not fear it:

Worship, pray; flatter whatever king

is king today; but I care less than nothing

for Zeus. Let him do just as he likes;

let him be king for his short time: he won’t

be king of the gods for long (938-42).

Similarly, Prometheus mocks Hermes by flaunting his disregard of Zeus’s regime and bragging that “when I measure my misfortune / against your slavery, I would not change” (966-67). In other words, Prometheus prefers to retain his freedom of speech (even if that means he must suffer physical torment) rather than to escape his torments at the price of bowing to Zeus’s tyranny. The way Prometheus sees it, the apparent freedom that Hermes or the Chorus enjoy is no freedom at all.

Though Hermes cannot understand Prometheus’s decision—he dismisses him as “mad” (977; cf. 1054) and likens him to a “colt new-broken” (1010) who will eventually be beaten into submission—the Chorus increasingly comes to see Prometheus’s side of things. By the end of the play, the Chorus determines to stand with Prometheus steadfastly. The brutality of Zeus and the other gods have laid bare the emptiness of tyranny, prompting the Chorus to declare at last that they “want to endure along with [Prometheus] / what [they] must endure” (1067-68). This is a far cry from the Chorus’s attitude throughout the play, where they continually counselled Prometheus to end his defiance and submit to Zeus’s will so as to avoid further punishment: Now, seeing the magnitude of Zeus’s tyranny, the Chorus embraces Prometheus’s perspective and stands against tyranny, even though doing so means accepting that they too might suffer.

Hermes prefaces Prometheus’s punishment with a warning, telling Prometheus and the Chorus not to blame Zeus for their suffering but themselves. After all, Zeus told them what they would suffer if they defied him. This warning recalls the beginning of the Odyssey, one of the most formative works of early Greek literature, where Zeus complains that humans blame the gods for their misfortunes, even though they “of themselves, through their own blind folly, have sorrows beyond that which is ordained” (Odyssey Book 1, Lines 33-34, trans. A. T. Murray). That is, the gods give humans law and even remind them to follow those laws (as when Zeus sent Hermes to tell Aegisthus to refrain from murdering his cousin Agamemnon), but humans do not listen and so must suffer the price (as when Aegisthus disregarded Hermes’s warning, murdered Agamemnon, and was killed in turn by Agamemnon’s son Orestes).

But this idea—that what one suffers is their own fault, not that of the gods—becomes much more feeble when uttered by Hermes in the context of Prometheus Bound. For in the story of Prometheus (unlike the story of Aegisthus), Zeus’s warnings are not made in the name of justice. Rather, what Zeus does in the play only serves to highlight The Conflict Between Power and Justice. And however bleak the ending of the play—which ends with Prometheus calling the firmament to witness “how unjustly” (1093)—we are still left with the promise that Zeus and his savage tyranny will someday come to an end.