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The scene seems at first an exception to the early conventional rule, which forbade the introduction of a third actor on the Greek stage. But it has been noticed that (1.) Force does not speak, and (2.) Prometheus does not speak till Strength and Force have retired, and that it is therefore probable that the whole work of nailing is done on a lay figure or effigy of some kind, and that one of the two who had before taken part in the dialogue then speaks behind it in the character of Prometheus. So the same actor must have appeared in succession as Okeanos, Io, and Hermes.

Prometheus (Forethought) is the son of Themis (Right) the second occupant of the Pythian Oracle (Eumen. v. 2.) His sympathy with man leads him to impart the gift which raised them out of savage animal life, and for this Zeus, who appears throughout the play as a hard taskmaster, sentences him to fetters. Hephæstos, from whom this fire had been stolen, has a touch of pity for him. Strength, who comes as the servant, not of Hephæstos, but of Zeus himself, acts as such with merciless cruelty.

The generalised statement refers to Zeus, as having but recently expelled Cronos from his throne in Heaven.

Hephæstos, as the great fire-worker, had taught Prometheus to use the fire which he afterwards bestowed on men.

Perhaps, “All might is ours except o'er Gods to rule.”

The words indicate that the effigy of Prometheus, now nailed to the rock, was, as being that of a Titan, of colossal size.

The touch is characteristic as showing that here, as in the Eumenides, Æschylos relied on the horribleness of the masks, as part of the machinery of his plays.

The legend is from Hesiod, (Theogon. v. 567.) The fennel, or narthex, seems to have been a large umbelliferous plant, with a large stem filled with a sort of pith, which was used when dry as tinder. Stalks were carried as wands (the thyrsi) by the men and women who joined in Bacchanalian processions. In modern botany, the name is given to the plant which produces Asafœtida, and the stem of which, from its resinous character, would burn freely, and so connect itself with the Promethean myth. On the other hand, the Narthex Asafœtida is found at present only in Persia, Affghanistan, and the Punjaub.

The ocean nymphs, like other divine ones, would be anointed with ambrosial unguents, and the odour would be wafted before them by the rustling of their wings. This too we may think of as part of the “stage effects” of the play.

The words are not those of a vague terror only. The sufferer knows that his tormentor is to come to him before long on wings, and therefore the sound as of the flight of birds is full of terrors.

The silence of Prometheus up to this point was partly, as has been said, consequent on the conventional laws of the Greek drama, but it is also a touch of supreme insight into the heroic temper. In the presence of his torturers, the Titan will not utter even a groan. When they are gone, he appeals to the sympathy of Nature.

By some stage mechanism the Chorus remains in the air till verse 280, when, at the request of Prometheus, they alight.

Here, as throughout the play, the poet puts into the mouth of his dramatis personæ words which must have seemed to the devouter Athenians sacrilegious enough to call for an indictment before the Areiopagos. But the final play of the Trilogy came, we may believe, as the Eumenides did in its turn, as a reconciliation of the conflicting thoughts that rise in men's minds out of the seeming anomalies of the world.

The words leave it uncertain whether Themis is identified with Earth, or, as in the Eumenides, (v. 2,) distinguished from her. The Titans as a class, then, children of Okeanos and Chthôn, (another name for Land or Earth,) are the kindred rather than the brothers of Prometheus.

The generalising words here, as in v. 35, appeal to the Athenian hatred of all that was represented by the words tyrant and tyranny.

The state described is that of men who “through fear of death are all their life-time subject to bondage.” That state, the parent of all superstition, fostered the slavish awe in which Zeus delighted. Prometheus, representing the active intellect of man, bestows new powers, new interests, new hopes, which at last divert them from that fear.

The home of Okeanos was in the far West, at the boundary of the great stream surrounding the whole world, from which he took his name.

One of the sayings of the Seven Sages, already recognised and quoted as a familiar proverb.

In the mythos, Okeanos had given his daughter Hesione in marriage to Prometheus after the theft of fire, and thus had identified himself with his transgression.

In the Theogony of Hesiod, (v. 509,) Prometheus and Atlas appear as the sons of two sisters. As other Titans were thought of as buried under volcanoes, so this one was identified with the mountain which had been seen by travellers to Western Africa, or in the seas beyond it, rising like a column to support the vault of heaven. In Herodotos (iv. 174) and all later writers, the name is given to the chain of mountains in Libya, as being the “pillar of the firmament;” but Humboldt and others identify it with the lonely peak of Teneriffe, as seen by Phœnikian or Helenic voyagers. Teneriffe, too, like most of the other Titan mountains, was at one time volcanic. Homer (Odyss. i. 53) represents him as holding the pillars which separate heaven from earth; Hesiod (Theogon. v. 517) as himself standing near the Hesperides, (this too points to Teneriffe) sustaining the heavens with his head and shoulders.

The volcanic character of the whole of Asia Minor, and the liability to earthquakes which has marked nearly every period of its history, led men to connect it also with the traditions of the Titans, some accordingly placing it in Phrygia, some near Sardis, some, as here, in Kilikia. Hesiod (Theogon. v. 820) describes Typhon as a serpent-monster hissing out fire; Pindar (Pyth. i. 30, viii. 21) as lying with his head and breast crushed beneath the weight of Ætna, and his feet extending to Cumæ.

The words point probably to an eruption, then fresh in men's memories, which had happened B.C. 476.

By some editors this speech from “No, not so,” to “thou know'st how,” is assigned to Okeanos.

These are, of course, the Amazons, who were believed to have come through Thrakè from the Tauric Chersonesos, and had left traces of their name and habits in the Attic traditions of Theseus.

Beyond the plains of Skythia, and the Lake Mæotis (the sea of Azov) there would be the great river Okeanos, which was believed to flow round the earth.

Sarmatia has been conjectured instead of Arabia. No Greek author sanctions the extension of the latter name to so remote a region as that north of the Caspian.

The Greek leaves the object of the sympathy undefined, but it seems better to refer it to that which Atlas receives from the waste of waters around, and the dark worlds beyond, than to the pity shown to Prometheus. This had been already dwelt on in line 421.

The passage that follows has for modern palæontologists the interest of coinciding with their views as to the progress of human society, and the condition of mankind during what has been called the “Stone” period. Comp. Lucretius, v. 955–984.

Comp. Mr Blakesley's note on Herod. ii. 4, as showing that here there was the greater risk of faulty observation.

Another reading gives perhaps a better sense—

In Greece, as throughout the East, the ox was used for all agricultural labours, the horse by the noble and the rich, either in war chariots, or stately processions, or in chariot races in the great games.

Compare with this the account of the inventions of Palamedes in Sophocles, Fragm. 379.

Here we can recognise the knowledge of one who had studied in the schools of Pythagoras, or had at any rate picked up their terminology. A more immediate connexion may perhaps be traced with the influence of Epimenides, who was said to have spent many years in searching out the healing virtues of plants, and to have written books about them.

The lines that follow form almost a manual of the art of divination as then practised. The “ominous sounds” include chance words, strange cries, any unexpected utterance that connected itself with men's fears for the future. The flights of birds were watched by the diviner as he faced the north, and so the region on the right hand was that of the sunrise, light, blessedness. On the left there was darkness and gloom and death.

The points of contact between the myth of Io and that of Prometheus, as adopted, or perhaps developed, by Æschylos, are—(1.) that from her the destined deliverer of the chained Titan is to come; (2.) that both were suffering from the cruelty of Zeus; (3.) that the wanderings of Io gave scope for the wild tales of far countries on which the imagination of the Athenians fed greedily. But, as the Suppliants may serve to show, the story itself had a strange fascination for him. In the birth of Epaphos, and Io's release from her frenzy, he saw, it may be, a reconciliation of what had seemed hard to reconcile, a solution of the problems of the world, like in kind to that which was shadowed forth in the lost Prometheus Unbound.

Inachos the father of Io (identified with the Argive river of the same name) was, like all rivers, a son of Okeanos and therefore brother to the nymphs who had come to see Prometheus.

The words used have an almost technical meaning as applied to animals that were consecrated to the service of a God, and set free to wander where they liked. The fate of Io, as at once devoted to Zeus and animalised in form, was thus shadowed forth in the very language of the Oracle.

Lerna was a lake near the mouth of the Inachos, close to the sea. Kerchneia may perhaps be identified with the Kenchreæ, the haven of Korinth in later geographies.

The wicker huts used by Skythian or Thrakian nomads (the Calmucks of modern geographers) are described by Herodotos (iv. 46) and are still in use.

Sc., the N.E. boundary of the Euxine, where spurs of the Caucasos ridge approach the sea.

The Chalybes are placed by geographers to the south of Colchis. The description of the text indicates a locality farther to the north.

Probably the Araxes, which the Greeks would connect with a word conveying the idea of a torrent dashing on the rocks. The description seems to imply a river flowing into the Euxine from the Caucasos, and the condition is fulfilled by the Hypanis or Kouban.

When the Amazons appear in contact with Greek history, they are found in Thrace. But they had come from the coast of Pontos, and near the mouth of the Thermôdon, (Thermeh.) The words of Prometheus point to yet earlier migrations from the East.

Here, as in Soph. Antig. (970) the name Salmydessos represents the rockbound, havenless coast from the promontory of Thynia to the entrance of the Bosporos, which had given to the Black Sea its earlier name of Axenos, the “inhospitable.”

The track here is in some confusion. From the south coast of the Black Sea, Io is to find her way to the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea) and the Kimmerian Bosporos, which flows into the Sea of Azov.

Here, as in a hundred other instances, a false etymology has become the parent of a myth. The name Bosporos is probably Asiatic not Greek, and has an entirely different signification.

The lines refer to the story that Zeus loved Thetis the daughter of Nereus, and followed her to Caucasos, but abstained from marriage with her because Prometheus warned him that the child born of that union should overthrow his father. Here the future is used of what was still contingent only. In the lost play of the Trilogy the myth was possibly brought to its conclusion and connected with the release of Prometheus.

Heracles, whose genealogy was traced through Alcmena, Perseus, Danaë, Danaos, and seven other names, to Epaphos and Io.

Probably the Kimmerian Bosporos. The Tanais or Phasis has, however, been conjectured.

Kisthene belongs to the geography of legend, lying somewhere on the shore of the great ocean-river in Libya or Ethiopia, at the end of the world, a great mountain in the far West, beyond the Hesperides, the dwelling place, as here, of the Gorgons the daughters of Phorkys. Those first named are the Graiæ.

Here, like the “wingèd hound” of v. 1043, for the eagles that are the messengers of Zeus.

We are carried back again from the fabled West to the fabled East. The Arimaspians, with one eye, and the Grypes or Gryphons (the griffins of mediæval heraldry) quadrupeds with the wings and beaks of eagles, were placed by most writers (Herod. iv. 13, 27) in the north of Europe, in or beyond the terra incognita of Skythia. The mention of the “ford of Pluto” and Æthiopia, however, may possibly imply (if we identify it, as Mr Paley does, with the Tartessos of Spain, or Bœtis (Guadalquivir) that Æschylos followed another legend which placed them in the West.

The name was applied by later writers (Quintus Curtius, iv. 7, 22; Lucretius, vi. 848) to the fountain in the temple of Jupiter Ammon in the great Oasis. The “river Æthiops” may be purely imaginary, but it may also suggest the possibility of some vague knowledge of the Niger, or more probably of the Nile itself in the upper regions of its course. The “Bybline hills” carry the name Byblos, which we only read of as belonging to a town in the Delta, to the Second Cataract.

Comp. Sophocles, Trachin, v. 1168.

The Adriatic or Ionian Gulf.

In the Suppliants, Zeus is said to have soothed her, and restored her to her human consciousness by his “divine breathings.” The thought underlying the legend may be taken either as a distortion of some primitive tradition, or as one of the “unconscious prophecies” of heathenism. The deliverer is not to be born after the common manner of men, and is to have a divine as well as a human parentage.

See the argument of the Suppliants, who, as the daughters of Danaos, descended from Epaphos, are here referred to.

Argos. So in the Suppliants, Pelasgos is the mythical king of the Apian land who receives them.

Heracles, who came to Caucasos, and with his arrows slew the eagle that devoured Prometheus.

The word is simply an interjection of pain, but one so characteristic that I have thought it better to reproduce it than to give any English equivalent.

The maxim, “Marry with a woman thine equal,” was ascribed to Pittacos.

The Euhemerism of later scholiasts derived the name from a king Adrastos, who was said to have been the first to build a temple to Nemesis, and so the power thus worshipped was called after his name. A better etymology leads us to see in it the idea of the “inevitable” law of retribution working unseen by men, and independently even of the arbitrary will of the Gods, and bringing destruction upon the proud and haughty.

Either a mere epithet of intensity, as in our “thrice blest,” or rising from the supposed fact that every third wave was larger and more impetuous than the others, like the fluctus decumanus of the Latins, or from the sequence of three great waves which some have noted as a common phenomenon in storms.

Here again we have a strange shadowing-forth of the mystery of Atonement, and what we have learnt to call “vicarious” satisfaction. In the later legend, Cheiron, suffering from the agony of his wounds, resigns his immortality, and submits to die in place of the ever-living death to which Prometheus was doomed.

It is noticeable that both Æschylos and Sophocles have left us tragedies which end in a thunderstorm as an element of effect. But the contrast between the Prometheus and the Œdipus at Colonos as to the impression left in the one case of serene reconciliation, and in the other of violent antagonism, is hardly less striking than the resemblance in the outward phenomena, which are common to the two.