38 pages • 1 hour read
AeschylusPrometheus Bound
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 456A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Second Episode-Third StasimonChapter Summaries & Analyses
Second Episode Summary
Prometheus explains to the Chorus how his gift to humanity—the gift of fire—allowed humanity to develop knowledge, technology, and civilization. In fact, Prometheus provided humanity not only with fire but also taught them other valuable skills, including written language, sea navigation, medicine, and prophecy. Yet Prometheus is unable to find a cure for his own troubles: He is fated to suffer “ten thousand pangs and agonies” (512) before he gets his freedom. Even Zeus is not stronger than fate, though Prometheus declines to tell the Chorus the secret of Zeus’s downfall. Only by keeping this secret can Prometheus hope to someday escape his torment.
Second Stasimon Summary
The Chorus prays that they may never sin or oppose Zeus. They pity Prometheus but criticize him for “regard[ing] mortal beings too high” (544) and thus earning himself his punishment. It is not as though weak humans—“creatures of a day” (547)—can ever requit Prometheus’s kindness!
Third Episode Summary
Prometheus’s next visitor is Inachus’s daughter Io, an Argive princess who has been transformed into a cow. Chanting, Io asks about Prometheus and his punishment while also lamenting her own suffering and the gadfly that pesters her ceaselessly. Prometheus recognizes Io, whom Hera is now tormenting because of her illicit affair with her husband, Zeus. Io is surprised when Prometheus recognizes her, and asks him if he knows when her suffering will end. Prometheus reveals his own identity and promises to tell Io everything she wants to know.
Io first asks Prometheus why he is being punished, and Prometheus responds that Zeus has nailed him to the cliff to punish him, though he does not tell her what offense he is being punished for. Io then asks to know when her suffering will end, pressing Prometheus even after he warns her that it would be “[b]etter for [her] not to know this than to know it” (624). First, however, Io relates her story: She had started having dreams in which a voice revealed Zeus’s love for her. She disclosed these dreams to her father, Inachus, who proceeded to learn from an oracle that the gods wished him to exile Io. Not wanting to defy Zeus, Inachus exiled Io, and she promptly became a cow. She was initially watched by the many-eyed monster Argus, Hera’s henchman, and after he was killed, Hera sent a gadfly to torment her and pursue her across the world.
At Io’s prompting, Prometheus reveals her future: She will continue her journey through the East, traveling through the land of the Scythians, the Caucasus, and Asia. Io is horrified of the pain that awaits her. She is comforted, however, when Prometheus tells her that Zeus is destined to someday fall when he begets a son who is stronger than he is. Prometheus then tells Io that her wanderings will end when she reaches Egypt. There, Io will give birth to Zeus’s son, whose name will be Epaphus, and from Epaphus will emerge an important line of kings and heroes—one of whom will be the man who sets Prometheus free. Once Prometheus finishes his speech, Io is driven on once again by her gadfly. She exits to continue her wanderings.
Third Stasimon Summary
The Chorus sings of the importance of making an appropriate marriage: One should not seek a union with somebody of a higher social status, as doing so invites trouble. Indeed, Io—a mortal—was seduced by the god Zeus, and because of this, she is now forced to suffer terribly. Nobody can evade Zeus.
Second Episode-Third Stasimon Analysis
The second and third episodes bring the human element to the forefront, stressing Prometheus as humanity’s benefactor and developing the theme of The Role of Knowledge and Enlightenment in Human Progress. Prometheus’s speeches at the beginning of the second episode describe in detail the ways in which humanity benefited from Prometheus’s gifts. Before Prometheus’s theft of fire, humans were “mindless” (443); they “had eyes but saw / to no purpose; they had ears but did not hear” (447-48); they did not even know how to build houses or how to sow crops. It was Prometheus who changed this, giving humanity not only fire but everything they needed to become “masters of their minds” (444), including arts and technologies such as writing, sailing, medicine, and prophecy.
In helping humanity, Prometheus directly opposed the gods. He defied Zeus by stealing fire and giving it to humanity, but he also undermined his authority in other ways. For instance, Prometheus describes how he taught humanity about sacrifice and divination:
It was I who burned the thigh bones wrapped in fat
and the long shank bone; I set mortals on the road
to the murky craft of divination, making
the flaming signs, once dim, now clear to see (496-99).
In teaching humanity about “the murky craft of divination” (498), he made it possible for them to see things that had previously been hidden. Moreover, the “thigh bones wrapped in fat” that Prometheus mentions act as an allusion to a mythical tradition in which the Titan sought to trick Zeus by having him pick the inedible portion of the sacrificial victim for the gods (bones covered in attractive fat), while humanity kept the edible portions (meat covered by the unappetizing stomach). In Hesiod’s Theogony (Lines 535-44)—the earliest known retelling of this myth—Zeus is not actually deceived, though he allows Prometheus to reserve the best portions of the animal for humanity anyway; in Prometheus Bound, on the other hand, Prometheus emphasizes not his trickery but rather everything he sacrificed for the sake of humanity.
Io’s arrival—and her cruel torture—sheds further light on the affinity between Prometheus and humanity. Like Prometheus, Io “cannot find / a way to escape [her] troubles” (586-87), and like Prometheus, it is Zeus and his tyrannical behavior that is responsible for her suffering. Zeus seduced Io, like he seduced many women, and because of this, Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera, transformed her into a cow and sent a gadfly to pursue her relentlessly.
Prometheus is able to cheer Io up, however, by reminding her that Zeus is fated to fall someday. For even Zeus, as powerful as he is, “cannot escape what is fated” (517). But fate is ambivalent, as we have seen and continue to see. On the one hand, Prometheus and Io are both comforted by the knowledge that their suffering will end. This knowledge gives them something to hope for, and, as the Chorus observes, “It is a sweet thing to draw out / a long, long life in cheerful hopes” (536-37). On the other hand, knowing too clearly what is to come might be discouraging. This is why Prometheus is hesitant to tell Io about the limit of her suffering: He warns her that gaining this knowledge might “break [her] spirit” (628).
Much of the tragedy of Prometheus’s situation emerges from the fact that while he gave humanity everything they needed for their survival, he has “no clever means / to rid [himself] of [his] own present affliction” (470-71). Nor can the humans for whom he sacrificed so much help him either. Indeed, the Chorus points out the weakness of humanity in some of their most pointed criticisms of Prometheus:
Kindness that can’t be requited—tell me, where
is the help in that, my friend? What support
in creatures of a day? You did not see
the feebleness that draws its breath in gasps,
a dreamlike feebleness by which the race
of humans is held in bondage, a blind prisoner (545-50).
Prometheus, by all rational counts, has behaved foolishly, betraying the powerful gods to help weak humanity. And now that the gods have punished him, humans can do nothing at all to help him. Such is the nature of power in Prometheus Bound: Defying tyranny brings dire consequences, and justice and power are often opposed.
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