Reviews for Aeschylus: The Complete Plays, Vol. 2

The average rating for Aeschylus: The Complete Plays, Vol. 2 based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-18 00:00:00 Delia Chiriac This is a review of Prometheus Bound. Reviews of other plays in the same book are found elsewhere (see below) Peter Paul Rubens Prometheus, discoursing on his gifts to mankind: ... At first Mindless, I gave them mind and reason. - What I say Is not censure of mankind, but showing you How all my gifts to them were guided by goodwill. - In those days they had eyes, but sight was meaningless; Heard sounds, but could not listen; all their length of life They passed like shapes in dreams, confused and purposeless. Of brick-built, sun-warmed houses, or of carpentry, They had no notion; lived in holes, like swarms of ants, Or deep in sunless caverns; knew no certain way To mark off winter, or flowery spring, or fruitful summer; Their every act was without knowledge, till I came. This play was the first in a trilogy. The others, both lost, were Prometheus Unbound (in which Zeus presented his case for the justness of his punishment of Prometheus) and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer. The translator, Philip Vellacott, in his excellent introduction to the four plays, expresses the view that it is difficult to imagine what material was left to cover in the last play, though it's assumed that somehow a resolution of the cases made by Prometheus and Zeus in the first two plays was concocted. - - - - - - - - - - Set the play at the dawn of human existence, or perhaps at a time when Greek "civilization" was thought to have been no more than barbaric, with little use of man's mental faculties. In Greek mythology this was in the time of the Titans. (See below) Edith Hamilton cautions us, "The Greeks did not believe the gods created the universe. It was the other way about: the universe created the gods. Before there were gods Heaven and Earth had been formed. They were the first parents. The Titans were their first children, and the gods were their grandchildren." The Titans were sometimes called the Elder Gods, and were supreme in the universe for an untold amount of time. The most important was Cronos, who ruled over the other Titans until his son, Zeus, dethroned him and seized power. There were other notable Titans: Ocean, the river that encircled the earth; his wife Tethys; Hyperion, the father of the sun, the moon, and the dawn; Mnemosyne, which means Memory; Themis (Justice); and Iapetus, important because of his two sons - Atlas, who bore the world on his shoulders, and Prometheus, who was the savior of mankind. (from Hamilton, Mythology) So, Prometheus: the savior of mankind. Why did mankind need a savior? Where did men come from? The human race was created in the time of the Titans. But, says Vellacott,man was early recognized as a regrettable failure, and kept in a state of wretchedness and total subservience. Force ruled everything; reason and right were unknown. The Titans were a race of gigantic size and strength, and [at least in one version of the myth] no intelligence; until in one of them, Prometheus, emerged rational and moral qualities, ranging from cunning and ingenuity to a love of freedom and justice. The knowledge that the future lay with such intangible principles rather than with brute strength, was a secret possessed by Earth, who imparted it to her son Prometheus. This certainly set Prometheus at the side of Zeus, son of Cronos, in rebellion against his father and the older dynasty; and by Prometheus' help Zeus and the other 'Olympian' gods won the day and thenceforward ruled the universe. But Prometheus was not only an immortal; he was also a son of Earth, and felt a natural sympathy with the earth's mortal inhabitants. The race which Zeus despised and planned to destroy, Prometheus saw as capable of infinite development. He stole fire from heaven and gave it to them; and he taught them the basic mental and manual skills. In so doing he frustrated Zeus's plan to create a more perfect race… What win our favor for Prometheus is largely the fact that he believed in, and wanted to help, the human race as it is, full of both noble achievement and pitiable squalor, honoring both goodness and wickedness… But though in this play the balance of feeling is in favor of Prometheus, even the sympathetic Chorus rebuke him for pride: and it is clear that Zeus's case has yet to be presented. the play Like the other plays in this volume, there are no jumps in time, or changes of setting. Prometheus is present on the stage throughout. The Chorus is present on the stage from the time they enter right up to the end. The other characters enter and leave the stage, presenting the minimal "scene change" that apparently was accepted in early Greek drama. Here's a synopsis. - It begins with Prometheus being dragged onto the stage by STRENTH and VIOLENCE (are these minor Titans? children of the Titans? I'm not sure. This may be an example of the fact that many of the relations between non-human beings in Greek mythology are notably ambiguous, even seemingly contradictory from one tale to another.) At any rate, there really is some action on the stage to open the play. HEPHAESTUS, the god of Fire, follows these three onto the stage. He doesn't really want to be there, because he understands what he is supposed to do. His opening speech establishes Aeschylus' setting for the play:For you two, Strength and Violence, the command of Zeus Is now performed. You are released. But how can I Find heart to lay hands on a god of my own race, And cruelly clamp him to this better, bleak ravine? And yet I must; heart or no heart, this I must do. To slight what Zeus has spoken is a fearful thing. [to PROMETHEUS] Son of sagacious Themis, god of mountainous thoughts, With heart as sore as yours I now shall fasten you In bands of bronze immovable to this desolate peak, Where you will hear no voice, nor see a human form; But scorched with the sun's flaming rays your skin will lose Its bloom of freshness. Glad you will be to see the night Cloaking the day with her dark spangled robe; and glad Again when the sun's warmth scatters the frost at dawn. Each changing hour will bring successive pain to rack Your body; and no man yet born shall set you free. Your kindness to the human race has earned you this. A god who would not bow to the gods' anger - you, Transgressing right, gave privileges to mortal men. For that you shall keep watch upon this bitter rock, Standing upright, unsleeping, never bowed in rest. And many groans and cries of pain shall come from you, All useless; for the heart of Zeus is hard to appease. Power newly won is always harsh. Hephaestus rivets each of the arms to the rock. He is then commanded by Strength to "drive straight through the chest with all the force you have/the unrelenting fang of the adamantine [unbreakable] wedge." Once this is done, the three leave Prometheus to his misery. Prometheus cries out,See with what outrage Racked and tortured I am to agonize For a thousand years! See this shameful prison Invented for me By the new master of the gods! … I know exactly every thing That is to be; no torment will come unforeseen. My appointed fate I must endure as best I can, knowing the power of Necessity is irresistible. Under such suffering, speech and silence are alike Beyond me. For bestowing gifts upon mankind I am harnessed in this torturing clamp. For I am he Who hunted out the source of fire, and stole it, … And fire has proved For men a teacher in every art, their grand resource. That was the sin for which I now pay the full price, Bared to the winds of heaven, bound and crucified. … - The CHORUS now enters in a winged ship and speak to Prometheus at length. They leave the ship, and gather around Prometheus as OCEANUS arrives, seated on a winged four-footed creature. She insists that she feels great friendship toward him, and admonishes him to be less proud, in this new regime in which Zeus has achieved rule over the other gods. - Next Io enters. This is the longest "scene" in the play. Io, the virgin daughter of the king of Argos, is a fellow victim, indirectly, of Zeus. When Zeus first saw her he desired her. His wife Hera became aware of the attraction before a union had been consummated, and took steps to prevent it by transforming Io into a cow, then set the giant Argus to watch over her. Zeus had Hermes kill Argus, but Hera responded to this by sending a gadfly to torment Io, driving her from place to place all over the known world. The Chorus asks Io to tell her story, and as she does Prometheus recounts his personal knowledge of Io's travail, and even tells her what will befall her in the future before she finds salvation from the enmity of Hera and the lust of Zeus. - Finally Prometheus is visited by the last character, Hermes, who has been sent on an errand by Zeus. It seems that Zeus has foreknowledge that a son of his will cause his downfall, and Zeus wants Prometheus to use his powers to reveal to him who the mother of this child will be. Prometheus mocks Hermes, claiming that he will not share this knowledge with the god who is responsible for his torments. Hermes warns Prometheus, and the Chorus, who seem to defend him, that they'll be sorry for being so pig-headed. Once Hermes leaves, his warning about Zeus' thunder and lightning comes to pass, and Prometheus cries, "Now it is happening; threat gives place to performance. The earth rocks; thunder, echoing from the depth/Roars in answer; fiery lightnings twist and flash… The cataclysm advances visibly upon me, Sent by Zeus to make me afraid. Oh Earth, my holy mother, O sky, where sun and moon Give light to all in turn, You see how I am wronged!" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Previous review: Americanah Next review: Varieties of Disturbance Older review: The Numbers Game Previous library review: Seven Against Thebes Aeschylus Next library review: The Suppliants Aeschylus.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-14 00:00:00 Brian Kearney The Persians and Other Plays is a collection of plays and commentary about plays by Aeschylus. The book contains the following: The Persians Seven Against Thebes The Suppliants Prometheus Bound Each play comes with a thorough introduction of the play itself as well as details of what we (think we) know about the history of the play's original performances and how they may have influenced other Classical plays and playwrights, references in which inevitably have been used to date the plays themselves. This is followed by more commentary and notes on the plays and on related plays that may have existed. For example, it appears from the commentary that it has long been unclear in what order Aeschylus wrote the plays: The production of 472 is the only one by Aeschylus that is known to have consisted of four plays whose stories were, on the face of it, unrelated - indeed, they were not even placed in proper chronological order. The first play was Phineus, about an episode in the saga of the Argonauts. This was followed by The Persians; then, jumping back to the heroic age, by Glaucus of Potniae, about a man who subjected his horses to an unnatural training regime and was devoured by them after crashing in a chariot race; and then by a satyr play about Prometheus ("Prometheus the Fire-Bearer" or "Fire-Kindler"). Repeated efforts have been made to find method behind the apparent madness of this arrangement, so far with little success. As entertaining as it is to imagine someone making a simple mistake when noting down the running order of the plays in Ancient times, this must be quite frustrating to Classicists. It took me way longer to read this collection than I thought but I don't regret a single minute of it. While some of the concepts discussed and displayed in the plays were not instantly recognisable to a 20th- and 21th-century reader, the context and explanatory notes provided by Alan H. Sommerstein were so excellent that each of the plays not only made sense but actually made it a joy to discover how Aeschylus' may have raised smiles in some and incensed others of his audiences. And some ideas and points of view in his plays - especially the description of the Persian's defeat (in The Persians), the exposition that women may refuse marriage (in The Suppliants), and some of the rather humanist views of Prometheus (in Prometheus Bound) - were quite different from what I had expected. Or rather, different from what I have come to expect from the Ancient Greek world when coming to Ancient Greek drama after reading the Greek myths (in whichever version: Apollodorus, Ovid, or any of the modern retellings). But even coming to Aeschylus with some familiarity of other playwrights such a Sophocles, I found Aeschylus surprisingly empathetic, satirical, and ... oddly modern. CHORUS: You didn't, I suppose, go even further than that? PROMETHEUS: I did: I stopped mortals foreseeing their death. CHORUS: What remedy did you find for that affliction? PROMETHEUS: I planted blind hopes within them. CHORUS: That was a great benefit you gave to mortals. PROMETHEUS: And what is more, I gave them fire. It is easy to think of Prometheus only as the rebel who went against Zeus' wishes and brought fire to mankind, but there is more to him. I loved how Aeschylus focuses not on the fire-bringing alone but also on his shared humanity, and on the prophecy that Prometheus knew of that would lead to the decline of Zeus' power, the proverbial Götterdämmerung of the Ancient Greek gods. PROMETHEUS: It's very easy for someone who is standing safely out of trouble to advise and rebuke the one who is in trouble. I knew that, all along. I did the wrong thing intentionally, intentionally, I won't deny it: by helping mortals, I brought trouble on myself. But I certainly never thought I would have a punishment anything like this, left to wither on these elevated rocks, my lot cast on this deserted, neighbourless crag. Now stop lamenting my present woes: descend to the ground and hear of my future fortunes, so that you will know it all to the end. Do as I ask, do as I ask. Share the suffering of one who is in trouble now: misery, you know, wanders everywhere, and alights on different persons at different times.