All things may be, but this:
To dictate to the gods. There's one that's free,
One only--Jove.
And Hephaestus sullenly acquiesces, as he beats away at his task,
"I know it, and am dumb."
--Amid similar talk--of protest from Vulcan and pitiless menace from
Might--the great blacksmith proceeds to force an adamantine bolt
through the breast of Prometheus, then to nail his feet to the rock,
and so at last cries, in relief,
Let us away, He's fettered, limb and thew.
But Might must have his last pitiless speech.
"There lie,
he exults,--
And feed thy pride on this bare rock,
Filching god's gifts for mortal men. What man
Shall free thee from these woes? Thou hast been called
In vain the Provident:
(_pro-vident_, same as pro-metheus, he who looks ahead, who provides,
the provident.)
had thy soul possessed
The virtue of thy name, thou had'st foreseen
These cunning toils, and had'st unwound thee from them.
Here all depart but Prometheus. Up to this time the Titan has
maintained a proud silence. He now breaks into that large invocation
which seems still to assault our physical ears across the twenty odd
centuries.
O divine Aether, and swift-winged Winds,
And Fountains of the rivers and multitudinous
Laughter of ocean, and thou Earth,
Born mother of us all, and thou bright round
Of the all-seeing Sun, you I invoke!
Behold what ignominy of causeless wrongs
I suffer from the gods, myself a god!
(This, by the way, is one of those passages which our elder poets seem
to have regarded as somehow lying outside the pale of moral law--like
umbrellas--and which they have therefore appropriated without a
thought of blushing. Byron, in _Manfred_, and Shelley, in his
_Prometheus Unbound_, have quite fairly translated parts of it.)
Enter now a chorus of Oceanides, and these continue throughout the
play to perform the functions of exciting sympathy for the
Protagonist, and of calling upon him for information when it becomes
necessary that the audience should know this and that fact essential
to the intelligibility of the action.
For example, after the Oceanides have alighted from their wind-borne
car, and have condoled with the sufferer, Aeschylus makes them the
medium of drawing from Prometheus the recital of his wrongs, and thus
of freshly placing that whole tremendous story before the minds of his
audience.
Speak now,
say the chorus,
"And let us know the whole offence
Jove charges thee withal."