Prometheus Bound

Prometheus Bound stages the punishment of the Titan Prometheus, chained to a remote crag by order of Zeus for stealing fire and giving it, along with the arts of civilization, writing, medicine, and prophecy, to a helpless early humanity Zeus had intended to destroy. Almost static in its action, the play is built instead from a series of visitors, the chorus of Ocean's daughters, the god Oceanus, the wandering, gadfly-tormented Io, and Zeus's messenger Hermes, each drawing out Prometheus's defiant, unrepentant account of his own suffering and his foreknowledge of Zeus's eventual downfall. Its authorship has long been questioned by scholars, some attributing it to Aeschylus's son Euphorion or another later hand rather than Aeschylus himself, on grounds of style and its unusually harsh portrait of Zeus, though ancient tradition transmitted it as part of the Aeschylean corpus.