Prometheus Bound

Prometheus Bound is the starkest and strangest of the classic Greek tragedies, a play in which god and man are presented as radically, indeed irreconcilably, at odds. The play begins with the shock of hammer blows as the Titan Prometheus is shackled and impaled to a rock in the Caucasus. This is his punishment not only for the gift of fire to humankind but for thwarting Zeus’s decision to exterminate the human race. Prometheus’s pain is unceasing, but he regrets nothing and refuses to recant his commitment to humanity, to whom he has brought not only fire but the knowledge of writing, mathematics, medicine, and architecture. He hints that he knows how Zeus will be brought low in the future, but when Hermes comes as Zeus’s emissary to demand that Prometheus divulge his secret, he refuses and is sent spinning into the abyss by a divine thunderbolt.

To whom does humanity owe thanks and allegiance: to the supreme deity or to the rebel Titan? Does our knowledge and very existence reflect a flaw woven into the fabric of being? What law controls the cosmos? Prometheus Bound, one of the great poetic achievements of the ancient world, appears here in a splendid new translation by Joel Agee that does full justice to the harsh and keening music of the original Greek.

Aeschylus (525 BC–456 BC), the first of ancient Greece’s major dramatists, is considered the father of Greek tragedy. He is said to have been the author of as many as ninety plays, of which seven survive.

Joel Agee is a writer and translator. He has received several prizes, including the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin in 2008 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s verse play Penthesilea. He is the author of two acclaimed memoirs—Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and, more recently, In the House of My Fear. His translation of Prometheus Bound was produced to much acclaim at the Getty Villa in 2013. He lives in Brooklyn.