FOOTNOTES TO THE PROMETHEUS BOUND
Classical Museum, No. XV. p 1.
Buck. (Introduction, p. xiii.) has very aptly compared here the position of Antigone, in the well-known play of that name, and the half-approving, half-condemning tone of the Chorus in that play.
The most remarkable passages of the ancients where reference is made to the Prometheus Unbound of Æschylus are:—Cicero, Tusc. II. 10; Arrian. Periplus Pont. Eux. p. 19; Strabo, Lib. I. p. 33 and IV. 182-3; Plutarchus. vit. Pompeii, init.; Athenæus. XV. p. 672, Cas.
“Veniat Æschylus non poeta solum, sed etiam Pythagoreus. Sic enim accepimus. Quo modo fert apud eum Prometheus dolorem, quern excipit ob furtum Lemnium.”—Tusc. Quæst. II. 10, Welcker; Trilogie, p. 7.
“Chorus consilietur amicis.”—Horace.
On the stage, of course, her transmutation can only be indicated by the presence of a pair of ox horns on her virgin forehead.
ἡ ποικιλείμων νύξ. Buntgewandige—Schoe. “Various-vested Night.”—Coleridge, in a Sonnet to the Autumnal Moon.
ἀιθέριον κίνυγμα.
Saturn the father of Jove.
“And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air: for it repenteth me that I have made him.”—Gen. vi. 7.
The Sea of Azof.
“Of all the things that breathe the air, and creep upon the Earth,
The weakest thing that breathes and creeps on nurturing Earth is Man.”
Homer’s Odys. xviii. 130.
i.e. Delphi.—See Schol. to Iliad II. 519.
Rhea’s bosomed sea—the Hadriatic.
The Ionian sea.
The Danaids, daughters of Danaus, who colonized Argos from Egypt. This forms the subject of the next play—the Suppliants.
See the Agamemnon, [Note 15].
Compare Odyssey, I. 32.