Sunday, February 27, 2011

Prometheus, Authorship Unknown

I was re-reading an ancient Greek play, Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus. Afterwards, on Wikipedia, I found that its authorship is now in dispute.

I hadn't kept up. I didn't even know there was a controversy!

I've never really cared for it as a play - it seems incredibly slow-moving. It's more interesting for the ideas it puts forth - including the brazen defiance which Prometheus offers to Zeus.

It turns out this impiety is one of the reasons that some scholars doubt that Aeschylus really wrote it. In other plays, Aeschylus exhibited a pious attitude toward Zeus. Well, that's one reason, and there are perceived stylistic differences, and finally I take it that we have no contemporaneous attribution to Aeschylus.

Scholars have reconstructed an outline of the trilogy which this play began. The trilogy has a sort of happy ending for the much-punished Prometheus.

Prometheus is bound,
but eventually cut loose,
once it's finally found
that his help is needed by Zeus.

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