M .

Mohsin
241575704
ENGL-307
Dr Waqar Azeem
Summary
Prometheus Bound is an old Greek tragedy written by Aeschylus, the dating of which is

uncertain. In the play, the whole interest is centred on the hero and his fate. Aeschylus

dramatizes the emotions and not the events by turning a long series of events into drama almost

without the help of action. The play concerns the god Prometheus, who in defiance of Zeus has

saved humanity with his gift of fire. Zeus has ordered that he be chained to a remote crag for this

act. Despite his evident solitude, Prometheus is visited by the god Oceanus, a chorus of Oceanus'

daughters, the "cow-headed" Io (also a Zeus victim), and lastly the god Hermes, who vainly

seeks Prometheus' knowledge of a secret that could endanger Zeus' supremacy. Prometheus is

cast into the underworld for further torture after refusing to reveal his secret. During these

scenes, we have two related dramatic movements: the cruelty of Zeus and Prometheus'

determination to resist the end, and a powerful dramatic movement is drawn from the gradual

disclosure of the secret that is Prometheus' weapon against Zeus. The conflict in the play is

between Zeus' irresistible power and Prometheus' immovable will, which has been strengthened

by Io's sufferings at Zeus' hands. The play's portrayal of Zeus as a dictator is the most striking

and divisive part of the work. The dealings of omnipotent gods with one another are not easily

made dramatic. Homer, for example, definitely did not make his gods very god-like. That's

because it was the only way it could be used as a dramatic agent, and the consequences of

defeating the gods were taken for granted as severe and unavoidable punishment. It was

Aeschylus who took over the primitive conceptions, some of them, that underlay his myth, in

particular, the shadowy conception of a Necessity stronger even than the gods and produced one

of the great tragedies of Greek literature.