NOTES TO PROMETHEUS BOUND
“This Scythian soil, this wild untrodden waste.”
“The ancient Greek writers called all the Northern tribes (i.e. all who dwelt in the Northern parts of Europe and Asia) generally by the name of Scythians and Celto-Scythians; while some even more ancient than these make a division, calling those beyond the Euxine, Ister, and Adria, Hyperboreans, Sarmatians, and Arimaspi; but those beyond the Caspian Sea, Sacæ and Massagetæ.” Strabo, Lib. XI. p. 507.—Stan.
“This daring wretch.”
λεωργὸν, a difficult word; “evil-doer”—Med. and Prow.; Bösewicht—Toelp.; Freveler—Schoe. The other translation of this word—“artificer of man” (Potter)—given in the Etym. was very likely an invention of Lexicographers to explain this very passage. But the expounders did not consider that Æschylus through the whole play makes no allusion to this function of the fire-worker. It was, I believe, altogether a recent form of the myth.—See Weiske. “The precise etymology of the word is uncertain.”—Lin.
“. . . a kindred god.”
“A fellow deity”—Med. But this is not enough. Vulcan, as a smith, and Prometheus were kindred in their divine functions, for which reason they were often confounded in the popular legends, as in the case of the birth of Pallas from the brain of Jove, effected by the axe, some say of Hephaestus, some of Prometheus—Apollodor. I. 3-6. Euripid. Ion. 455; from which passage of the tragedian Welcker is of opinion that Prometheus, not Hephaestus, must have a place in the pediment of the Parthenon representing the birth of Pallas.—Class. Museum, Vol. II. p. 385.
“High-counselled son
Of right-decreeing Themis.”
Not Clymene according to the Theogony (V. 508) or Asia, one of the Oceanides according to Apollodorus (I. 2), which parentage has been adopted by Shelley in his Prometheus Unbound. That Æschylus in preferring this maternity meant to represent the Titan as suffering in the cause of Right against Might, as Welcker will have it (Trilog. p. 42), is more than doubtful. One advantage, however, is certainly gained, viz., that Prometheus is thus brought one degree further up the line of ascent in direct progress from the two original divinities of the Theogony—Uranus or Heaven, and Gee or the Earth; for, according to Hesiod, Themis is the daughter, Clymene only the grand-daughter, of these primeval powers (Theog. 135, 315). Thus, Prometheus is invested with more dignity, and becomes a more worthy rival of Jove.
“. . . saviour shall be none.”
I entirely agree with Schoe. that in the indefinite expression—(ο) λωφήσων γὰρ ὀυ πέφυκέ πω any allusion, such as the Scholiast suggests, to Hercules, the person by whom salvation did at length come, would be in the worst possible taste here, and quite foreign to the tone of the passage.
“Jove is not weak that he should bend.”
This character of harshness and inexorability belongs as essentially to Jove as to the Fates. Pallas, in the Iliad, makes the same complaint—
“But my father, harsh and cruel, with no gentle humour raging,
Thwarts my will in all things.”
Iliad VIII. 360.
We must bear in mind that Jove represents three things—(1) that iron firmness of purpose which is so essential to the character of a great ruler; (2) the impetuous violence and resistless power of the heavenly elements when in commotion; (3) the immutability of the laws of Nature.
“All things may be, but this
To dictate to the gods.”
Ἅπαντ ἐπράχθη πλὴν θε(ο)ισι κοιρανεῖν—literally, all things have been done, save commanding the gods. I do not know whether there is any philological difficulty in the way of this translation. It certainly agrees perfectly well with the context, and has the advantage of not changing the received text. Schoe., however, adopting Herm.’s emendation of ἐπαχθῆ translates—
“Last trägt ein jeder, nur der Götter König nicht.”
“All have their burdens save the king of the gods.”
On the theological sentiment, I would compare that of Seneca—“In regno nati sumus; Deo parere libertas est” (Vit. Beat. 15)—and that of Euripides, where the captive Trojan queen, finding the king of men, Agamemnon, willing to assist her, but afraid of the opinion of the Greeks, speaks as follows:—
“Ουκἔστι θνητῶν ὃστις ἐστ ἐλέυθερος,
ἢ χρημάτων γαρ δ(ο)υλος ἐστιν ἡ τύχης
η πλῆθος ἀυτὸν πόλεως, ἤ νόμων γρἤφαι
ἔιργουσι χρῆσθαι μὴ κατὰ γνῶμην τρόποις.”
Hec. 864.
“Thou hast been called
In vain the Provident.”
This is merely translating Prometheus (from προ before, and μῆτις counsel) into English. These allusions to names are very frequent in Æschylus—so much so as to amount to a mannerism; but we who use a language, the heritage of years, a coinage from which the signature has been mostly rubbed off, must bear in mind that originally all words, and especially names, were significant. See the Old Testament everywhere (particularly Gen. c. xxix. and xli., with which compare Homer, Odyssey xix. 407). And, indeed, in all original languages, like Greek or German, which declare their own etymology publicly to the most unlearned, no taunt is more natural and more obvious than that derived from a name. Even in Scotland, a man who is called Bairnsfather will be apt to feel rather awkward if he has no children. “In the oldest Greek legend,” says Welcker (Tril. p. 356), “names were frequently invented, in order to fix down the character or main feature of the story”—(so Bunyan in the Pilgrim’s Progress)—a true principle, which many German writers abuse, to evaporate all tradition into mere fictitious allegory. But the practice of the Old Testament patriarchs shows that the significancy of a name affords of itself no presumption against its historical reality.
Prometheus. The critics remark with good reason the propriety of the stout-hearted sufferer observing complete silence up to this point. It is natural for pain to find a vent in words, but a proud man will not complain in the presence of his adversary. Compare the similar silence of Cassandra in the Agamemnon; and for reasons equally wise, that of Faust in the Auerbach cellar scene. So true is it that a great poet, like a wise man, is often best known, not by what he says, but by what he does not say—(και τῆς ἂγαν γάρ έστί που σιγῆς βάρος, as Sophocles has it). As to the subject of the beautiful invocation here made by the Titan sufferer, the reader will observe not merely its poetical beauty (to which there is something analogous in Manfred, act I. sc. 2—
“My mother Earth,
And thou fresh-breaking day, and you, ye mountains,
And thou the bright eye of the Universe,”)
but also its mythological propriety in the person of the speaker, as in the early times the original elementary theology common to the Greeks with all polytheists, had not been superseded by those often sadly disguised impersonations which are represented by the dynasty of Jove. Ocean and Hyperion (ὑπερίων—he that walks aloft) are named in the Theogony, along with Themis and Iapetus, as the first generation of gods, directly begotten from Heaven and Earth.—(Theog. 133-4.) In the natural progress of religious opinion, this original cosmical meaning of the Greek gods, though lost by anthropomorphism to the vulgar, was afterwards brought out by the natural philosophers, and by the philosophical poets; of which examples occur everywhere among the later classics. Indeed, the elemental worship seems never to have been altogether exploded, but continued to exist in strange confusion along with the congregation of fictitious persons to which it had given birth. So in Homer, Agamemnon prays—
“Father Jove from Ida swaying, god most glorious and great,
And thou Sun, the all-perceiving and all-hearing power, and ye
Rivers and Earth,” etc.—Il. III. 277.
“The multitudinous laughter.”
ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα. I must offer an apology here for myself, Mr. Swayne, and Captain Medwyn, because I find we are in a minority. The Captain, indeed, has paraphrased it a little—
“With long loud laughs, exulting to be free,”
but he retains the laugh, which is the stumbling-block. Swayne has
“Ye ocean waves
That with incessant laughter bound and swell
Countless,”
also a little paraphrased, but giving due prominence to the characteristic idea. E. P. Oxon. has
“Ocean smiling with its countless waves,”
with a reference to Stanley’s note, “Refertur ad levem sonum undarum ventis exagitatarum qui etiam aliquantulum crispant maris dorsum quasi amabili quadam γελασιᾳ,” in which words we see the origin of Pot.’s—
“Ye waves
That o’er the interminable ocean wreathe
Your crisped smiles.”
Prow. has—
“Dimpled in multitudinous smiles.”
And Schoe.’s—
“Zahllosses Blinken.”
And so Blom. in a note, emphatically—
“Lenis fluctuum agitatio.”
But why all this gentleness? Does it agree either with the strength of the poet’s genius, or with the desolation of the wild scene around his hero? I at once admit that γελάω is often used in Greek, where, according to our usage, smile would be the word; but in the Old Testament we find the broad strong word laugh often retained in descriptions of nature; and I see not the least reason for walking in satin shoes here.
“. . . in a reed concealed it.”
νάρθηξ—“still used for this purpose in Cyprus, where the reed still retains the old Greek name”—Welcker, Tril. p. 8, who quotes Walpole’s Memoirs relative to Turkey, p. 284, and Tournefort, Letter 6. I recollect at school smoking a bit of bamboo cane for a cigar.
“. . . Ah me! ah me! who comes?”
The increased agitation of mind is here expressed in the original by the abandonment of the Iambic verse, and the adoption of the Bacchic—τίς ἀχὼ, etc., which speedily passes into the anapæst, as imitated by my Trochees. Milton was so steeped in Greek, that I think he must have had this passage in his mind when he wrote the lines of Samson Agonistes, v. 110, beginning “But who are these?” Altogether, the Samson is, in its general tone and character, quite a sort of Jewish Prometheus.
“Daughters of prolific Tethys.”
The ancient sea-goddess, sister and wife of Oceanus, daughter of Heaven and Earth. The reader will observe that the mythology of this drama preserves a primeval or, according to our phrase, antediluvian character throughout. The mythic personages are true contemporaries belonging to the most ancient dynasty of the gods. For this reason Ocean appears in a future stage of the play, not Poseidon. Tethys, with the other Titans and Titanesses are enumerated by Hesiod, Theog. 132-7, as follows—
“Earth to Uranus wedded bore Ocean deep with whirling currents,
Coeus, Creios, Hyperion, Theia, Rhea, Iapetus,
Themis, Mnemosyne, lovely Tethys, likewise Phœbe golden-crowned,
Then the youngest of them all, deep-designing Kronos.”
As for the epithet prolific applied to Tethys, the fecundity of fish is a proverb in natural history; but I suppose it is rather the infinite succession of waves on the expanded surface of Ocean that makes his daughters so numerous in the Theogony (362)—
“Thrice ten hundred they are counted delicate-ancled Ocean maids.”
“. . . the giant trace
Of Titan times hath vanished.”
Here we have distinctly indicated that contrast between the old and the new gods, which Æschylus makes so prominent, not only in this play, but also in the Furies. The conclusion has been drawn by various scholars that Æschylus was secretly unfavourable to the recognised dynasty of Jove, and that his real allegiance was to these elder gods. But the inference is hasty and unauthorised. His taste for the sublime led him into these primeval ages, as it also did Milton: that is all we can say.
“. . . the new-forged counsels
That shall hurl him from his throne.”
The new-forged counsels were of Jove’s own devising—viz., that he should marry Thetis; of which marriage, if it should take place, the son was destined to usurp his father’s throne.—Scholiast.
“O, ’tis hard, most hard to reach
The heart of Jove!”
Inexorability is a grand characteristic of the gods.
“Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.”—Virg., Æn. VI.
And so Homer makes Nestor say of Agamemnon, vainly hoping to appease the wrath of Pallas Athena, by hecatombs—
“Witless in his heart he knew not what dire sufferings he must bear,
For not lightly from their purposed counsel swerve the eternal gods.”
Odys. III. 147.
And of Jove, in particular, Hera says to Themis, in the council of the gods—
“Well thou knowest
How the Olympian’s heart is haughty, and his temper how severe.”
Iliad XV. 94.
“My mother Themis, not once but oft, and Earth
(One shape of various names).”
Æschylus does not and could not confound these two distinct persons, as Pot. will have it.—See Eumenides, 2. Schoe. has stated the whole case very clearly. Pot. remarks with great justice, that a multiplicity of names “is a mark of dignity;” it by no means follows, however, that Themis, in this passage, is one of those many names which Earth receives. In illustration we may quote a passage from the Kurma Ouran (Kennedy’s Researches on Hindoo Mythology; London, 1831; p. 208)—“That,” says Vishnu, pointing to Siva, “is the great god of gods, shining in his own refulgence, eternal, devoid of thought, who produced thee (Brahma), and gave to thee the Vedas, and who likewise originated me, and gave me various names.” Southey, in the roll of celestial dramatis personæ prefixed to the Curse of Kehama, says “that Siva boasts as many as one thousand and eight names.”
“Suspicion’s a disease that cleaves to tyrants,
And they who love most are the first suspected.”
“Nam regibus boni quam mali suspectiores sunt, semperque his aliena virtus formidolosa est.”—Sall. Cat. VII. “In princes fear is stronger than love; therefore it is often more difficult for them to tear themselves from persons whom they hate than to cast off persons whom they love.”—Richter (Titan).
“I only of the gods
Thwarted his will.”
This is one of the passages which has suggested to many minds a comparison between the mythical tortures of the Caucasus and the real agonies of Calvary. The analogy is just so far; only the Greek imagination never could look on Prometheus as suffering altogether without just cause; he suffered for his own sins. This Toepel. p. 71, has well expressed thus—“Prometheus deos laesit ut homines bearet: Christus homines beavit ut suae, Deique patris obsecundaret voluntati.”
“. . . in cunning torment stretched.”
ἀνηλεῶς ἐῤῥύθμισμαι—“so bin ich zugerichtet.”—Passow. A sort of studious malignity is here indicated. So we say allegorically to trim one handsomely, to dress him, when we mean to punish. The frequent use of this verb ρυθμίζω is characteristic of the Greeks, than whom no people, as has been frequently remarked, seem to have possessed a nicer sense of the beauty of measure and the propriety of limitation in their poetry and works of art. So Sophocles, Antig. 318, has ρυθμίζειν λύπην.
“Blind hopes of good I planted
In their dark breasts.”
A striking phrase, meaning, however, nothing more, I imagine, according to the use of the Greek writers (and also of the Latins with caecus) than dim, indistinct; neither, indeed, is the phrase foreign to our colloquial English idiom—“The swearing to a blind etcetera they (the Puritans) looked upon as intolerable.”—Calamy’s Life of Baxter. In the well-known story of Pandora, Hesiod relates that, when the lid of the fatal box was opened, innumerable plagues flew out, only Hope remained within.—Works and Days, 84.
“And flame-faced fire is now enjoyed by mortals?”
Lieutenant-Colonel Collins, in his account of New South Wales (London, 1804), mentions that the wild natives produced fire with much difficulty, and preserved it with the greatest care. The original inhabitants of New Holland, and the wild African bushmen described by Moffat, the missionary, are among the lowest specimens of human nature with which we are acquainted. As for Æschylus, it is evident he follows in this whole piece the notion of primitive humanity given in his introductory chapters by Diodorus, and generally received amongst the ancients, viz., that the fathers of our race were the most weak and helpless creatures imaginable, like the famous Egyptian frogs, as it were, only half developed from the primeval slime.
Enter Ocean. “This sea god enters,” says Brunoy, quoted by Pot., on “I know not what winged animal—bizarrerie inexplicable.” Very inexplicable certainly; and yet, as the tragedian expressly calls the animal a bird, I do not see why so many translators, both English and German, should insist on making it a steed. The bird certainly was a little anomalous, having, as we learn below, four feet (τετρασκελὴς ὀιωνός, v. 395—a four-footed bira); but it was a bird for all that, and the air was its element. If the creature must have a name, we must even call it a griffin, or a hippogriff, notwithstanding Welcker’s remarks (Tril. p. 26). Those who wish to see its physiognomy more minutely described may consult Aeliean. hist, animal. IV. 27, in an apt passage quoted from Jacobs by Both. There is an ambiguity in the passage which I have translated—
“Thought instinctive reined the creature,”
some applying γνώμῃ not to the animal, but to the will of the rider. So Prow.—
“Following still
Each impulse of my guiding will.”
But for the poetical propriety of my translation I can plead the authority of Southey—
“The ship of Heaven instinct with thought displayed
Its living sail, and glides along the sky.”
Curse of Kehama, VII. 1.
and of Milton—
“The chariot of paternal Deity
Instinct with spirit.”—VI. 750.
and what is much more conclusive in the present instance, that of Homer, whose τιτυσκόμεναι φρεσὶ νῆες (Odyssey VIII. 556), or self-piloted ships of the Phœnicians, belong clearly to the same mythical family as the self-reined griffin of old Ocean.
“From my distant caves cerulean.”
i.e., in the far West, extreme Atlantic, or “ends of the earth,” according to the Homeric phrase.
“To the ends I make my journey of the many-nurturing Earth,
There where Ocean, sire of gods, and ancient mother Tethys dwells,
They who nursed me in their palace, and my infant strength sustained,”
says Hera in the Iliad (XIV. 200).
“Enough my brother Atlas’ miseries grieve me.”
The reader will see by referring to the old editions and to Pot. that the following description of the miseries of Atlas and Typhon is, in the MS., given to Ocean; and, it must be confessed, there seems a peculiar dramatic propriety in making the old sea god hold up the fate of the Cilician Blaster as a warning to the son of Iapetus, whom he saw embarked in a similar career of hopeless rebellion against the Thunderer. But philological considerations, well stated by Schoe., have weighed with that editor, as with his predecessors Blom. and Well., whose authority and arguments I am for the present willing to follow, though not without some lingering doubts. The alteration of the text originally proceeded from Elmsley, and the original order of the dialogue is stoutly defended by Toepel. in his notes.
“The pillars of Heaven and Earth upon his shoulders.”
If the reader is a curious person, he will ask how Atlas when standing on the Earth—in the extreme west of the Earth—could bear the pillars of Heaven and Earth? and the question will be a very proper one; for the fact is that, as Hesiod distinctly states the case, he bore the pillars of Heaven only (Theog. 517). This is, indeed, the only possible idea that could be admitted into a mythology which proceeded on the old principle that the Earth was a flat solid platform in the centre of the Universe, round which the celestial pole (πόλος) wheeled. The phrase “pillars of Heaven and Earth” is, therefore, to a certain extent an improper one; for the Earth, being the stable base of all things, required no pillars to support it. In one sense it is true that the pillars of Atlas are the pillars of Heaven and Earth, viz., in so far as they have Heaven at one end and Earth at the other, which is what Homer means when he says (Odyssey I. 54), that these pillars “γᾶιάν τε καὶ ὀυρανὸν ἀμφὶς ἔχουσιν.” And that this is the idea of Æschylus, also, is plain, both from the present passage, and from the Epode of the next following Chorus, where, unless we force in one conjecture of Schütz, or another of Hermann into the text, there is no mention of anything but the celestial pole. In all this I but express in my own words, and with a very decided conviction, the substance of the admirable note in Schoe. to v. 426, Well.
“. . . Typhon.”
The idea of Typhon is that of a strong windy power, δεινόν ὑβριστήν τ ἄνεμον, according to the express statement of Hesiod (Theog. 307). The Greek word Typhon, with which our typhus fever is identical, expresses the state of being swollen or blown up; with this, the other idea of heat, which belongs also to Typhon (Sallust, περὶ θεῶν, c. 4), is naturally connected. According to the elementary or physical system of mythology, therefore, Typhon is neither more nor less than a simoom or hot wind.
“Knowest thou not this, Prometheus, that mild words
Are medicines of fierce wrath?”
The reader may like to see Cicero’s version of these four lines—
“Oceanus. Atqui Prometheu te hoc, tenere existimo
Mederi posse rationem iracundiæ.”
“Prom. Si quidem qui tempestivam medicinam admovens
Non ad gravescens vulnus illidat manus.”
Tusc. Q., III. 31.
“. . . holy Asia weep
For thee, Prometheus.”
Here, and in the epithet of the rivers in the Epode (compare Homer’s Odyssey X. 351, ἱερων ποταμων, and Nägelsbach, Homer, Theologie, p. 85), the original word is ἁγνος, a term to be particularly noted, both in the heathen writers and in the Old Testament, as denoting that religious purity in connection with external objects and outward ceremonies which the Christian sentiment confines exclusively to the moral state of the soul. I have thought it important, in all cases, to retain the Greek phrase, and not by modernizing to dilute it. The religious sentiment in connection with external nature is what the moderns generally do not understand, and least of all the English, whose piety does not readily exhibit itself beyond the precincts of the church porch. The Germans, in this regard, have a much more profound sympathy with the Greek mind.
“. . . Araby’s wandering warriors weep
For thee, Prometheus.”
Arabia certainly comes in, to a modern ear, not a little strangely here, between the Sea of Azof and the Caucasus; but the Greeks, we must remember, were a people whose notions of barbarian geography (as they would call it) were anything but distinct; and, in this play, the poet seems wisely to court vagueness in these matters rather than to study accuracy.
“For, soothly, having eyes to see, they saw not.”
With regard to the origin of the human race there are two principal opinions, which have in all times prevailed. One is, that man was originally created perfect, or in a state of dignity far transcending what he now exhibits; that the state in which the earliest historical records present him is a state of declension and aberration from the primeval source; and that the whole progress of what is called civilization is only a series of attempts, for the most part sufficiently clumsy, and always painful, whereby we endeavour to reinstate ourselves in our lost position. This philosophy of history—for so it may most fitly be called—is that which has always been received in the general Christian world; and, indeed, it seems to flow necessarily from the reception of the Mosaic records, not merely as authentic Hebrew documents, but as veritable cosmogony and primeval history—as containing a historical exposition of the creation of the world, and the early history of man. The other doctrine is, that man was originally created in a condition extremely feeble and imperfect; very little removed from vegetable dulness and brutish stupidity; and that he gradually raised himself by slow steps to the exercise of the higher moral and intellectual faculties, by virtue of which he claims successful mastery over the brute, and affinity with the angel. This doctrine was very common, I think I may safely say the current and generally received doctrine, among the educated Greeks and Romans; though the poets certainly did not omit, as they so often do, to contradict themselves by their famous tradition of a golden age, which it was their delight to trick out and embellish. In modern times, this theory of progressive development, as it may be called, has, as might have been expected, found little favour, except with philosophers of the French school; and those who have broached it in this country latterly have met with a most hot reception from scientific men, principally, we may presume, from the general conviction that such ideas go directly to undermine the authority of the Mosaic record. It has been thought, also, that there is something debasing and contrary to the dignity of human nature in the supposition that the great-grandfather of the primeval father of our race may have been a monkey, or not far removed from that species; but, however this be, with regard to Æschylus, it is plain he did not find it inconsistent with the loftiest views of human duty and destiny to adopt the then commonly received theory of a gradual development; and, in illustration, I cannot do better than translate a few sentences from Diodorus, where the same doctrine is stated in prose: “Men, as originally generated, lived in a confused and brutish condition, preserving existence by feeding on herbs and fruits that grew spontaneously. * * * Their speech was quite indistinct and confused, but by degrees they invented articulate speech. * * * They lived without any of the comforts and conveniences of life, without clothing, without habitations, without fire (Prometheus!), and without cooked victuals; and not knowing to lay up stores for future need, great numbers of them died during the winter from the effects of cold and starvation. By which sad experience taught, they learned to lodge themselves in caves, and laid up stores there. By-and-by, they discovered fire and other things pertaining to a comfortable existence. The arts were then invented, and man became in every respect such as a highly-gifted animal might well be, having hands and speech, and a devising mind ever present to work out his purposes.” Thus far the Sicilian (I. 8); and the intelligent reader need not be informed that, to a certain extent, many obvious and patent facts seemed to give a high probability to his doctrine. “Dwellers in caves,” for instance, or “troglodytes,” were well known to the ancients, and the modern reader will find a historical account of them in Strabo, and other obvious places. The Horites (Gen. xiv. 6) were so called from the Hebrew word Hor, a cave—(see Gesenius and Jahn, I. 2-26). But it is needless to accumulate learned references in a matter patent to the most modern observation.—Moffat’s “African Missions” will supply instances of human beings in a state as degraded as anything here described by the poet; and with regard to the aboriginal Australians, I have preserved in my notes the following passage from Collins: “The Australians dwell in miserable huts of bark, all huddled together promiscuously (ἔφυρον εικῆ πάντα!) amid much smoke and dirt. Some also live in caves.” I do by no means assert, however, that these creatures are remnants of primeval humanity, according to the development theory; I only say they afford that theory a historic analogy; while, on the other hand, they are equally consistent with the commonly received Christian doctrine, as man is a creature who degenerates from excellence much more readily in all circumstances than he attains to it. These Australians and Africans may be mere imbecile stragglers who have been dropt from the great army of humanity in its march.
“Numbers, too,
I taught them (a most choice device).”
“The Pythagorean tenets of Æschylus here display themselves. It was one of the doctrines attributed to this mysterious sect that they professed to find in numbers, and their combinations, the primordial types of everything cognisable by the mind, whether of a physical or moral nature. They even spoke of the soul as a number.”—Prow. But, apart from all Pythagorean notions, we may safely say—from observation of travellers indeed certainly affirm—that there is nothing in which the civilized man so remarkably distinguishes himself from the savage, as in the power to grasp and handle relations of number. The special reference to Pythagoras in this passage is, I perceive, decidedly rejected by Schoe.; Bergk. and Haupt., according to his statement, admitting it. Of course, such a reference in the mind of the poet can never be proved; only it does no harm to suppose it.
“. . . the fire-faced signs.”
(φλογωπὰ σήματα). Prowett refers this to lightning; but surely, in the present connection, the obvious reference is to the sacrificial flame, from which, as from most parts of the sacrificial ceremony, omens were wont to be taken. When the flame burned bright it was a good omen; when with a smoky and troublous flame, the omen was bad. See a well-known description of this in Sophocles’ Antigone, from the mouth of the blind old diviner Tiresias, when he first enters the stage, v. 1005; and another curious passage in Euripides’ Phœniss. 1261.
“And who is lord of strong Necessity?”
Necessity (Ἀνάγκη), a favourite power to which reference is made by the Greek dramatists, is merely an impersonation of the fact patent to all, that the world is governed by a system of strict and inexorable law, from the operation of which no man can escape. That the gods themselves are subject to this Ἀνάγκη. is a method of expression not seldom used by Heathen writers; but that they had any distinct idea, or fixed theological notion of Necessity or Fate, as a power separate from and superior to the gods I see no reason to believe.—See my observations on the Homeric μοῖρα in Clas. Mus., No. XXVI., p. 437. And in the same way that Homer talks of the fate from the gods, so the tragedians talk of necessity from or imposed by the gods—τὰς γὰρ ἐκ θεῶν ἀνάγκας θνητον ὀντα δεῖ φέρειν. With regard to Æschylus, certainly one must beware of drawing any hasty inference with regard to his theological creed from this insulated passage. For here the poet adopts the notion of the strict subjection of Jove to an external Fate, principally, one may suppose, from dramatic propriety; it suits the person and the occasion. Otherwise, the Æschylean theology is very favourable to the absolute supremacy of Jove; and, accordingly, in the Eumenides, those very Furies, who are here called his superiors, though they dispute with Apollo, are careful not to be provoked into a single expression which shall seem to throw a doubt on the infallibility of “the Father.” For the rest, the Fates and Furies, both here and in the Eumenides, are aptly coupled, and, in signification, indeed, are identical; because a man’s fate in this world can never be separated from his conduct, nor his conduct from his conscience, of which the Furies are the impersonation.
“No more than others Jove can ’scape his doom.”
The idea that the Supreme Ruler of the Universe can ever be dethroned is foreign to every closely reasoned system of monotheism; but in polytheistic systems it is not unnatural (for gods who had a beginning may have an end); and in the Hindoo theology receives an especial prominence. Southey accordingly makes Indra, the Hindoo Jove, say—
“A stronger hand
May wrest my sceptre, and unparadise
The Swerga.”—Curse of Kehama, VII.
We must bear in mind, however, that it is not Æschylus in the present passage, but Prometheus who says this.
“Plant his high will against my weak opinion!”
The original of these words, “μηδάμ θ(ε)ιτ᾽ εμᾀ γνώμᾶ κράτος ἀντίπαλον Ζεὺς,” has been otherwise translated “Minime Jupiter indat animo meo vim rebellem;” but, apart altogether from theological considerations, I entirely agree with Schoe. that this rendering puts a force upon the word κράτος, which is by no means called for, and which it will not easily bear.
“Won by rich gifts didst lead.”
Observe here the primitive practice according to which the bridegroom purchased his wife, by rich presents made to the father. In Iliad IX. 288, Agamemnon promises, as a particular favour, to give his daughter in marriage to Achilles ἀνάεδνον, that is, without any consideration in the shape of a marriage gift.
Enter Io. Io is one of those mysterious characters on the borderland between history and fable, concerning which it is difficult to say whether they are to be looked on as personal realities, or as impersonated ideas. According to the historical view of ancient legends, Io is the daughter of Inachus, a primeval king of Argos; and, from this fact as a root, the extravagant legends about her, sprouting from the ever active inoculation of human fancy, branched out. Interpreted by the principles of early theological allegory, however, she is, according to the witness of Suidas, the Moon, and her wanderings the revolutions of that satellite. In either view, the immense extent of these wanderings is well explained by mythological writers (1) from the influence of Argive colonies at Byzantium and elsewhere; and (2) from the vain desire of the Greeks to connect their horned virgin Io, with the horned Isis of the Egyptians. It need scarcely be remarked that, if Io means the moon, her horns are as naturally explained as her wanderings. But, in reading Æschylus, all these considerations are most wisely left out of view, the Athenians, no doubt, who introduced this play, believing in the historical reality of the Inachian maid, as firmly as we believe in that of Adam or Methuselah. As little can I agree with Both. that we are called upon to rationalize away the reality of the persecuting insect, whether under the name of ᾽(ο)ιστρος or μύωψ. In popular legends the sublime is ever apt to be associated with circumstances that either are, or, to the cultivated imagination, necessarily appear to be ridiculous.
“. . . save me, O Earth!”
I have here given the received traditionary rendering of Αλεῦ ὦ δᾶ; but I must confess the appeal to Earth here in this passage always appeared to me something unexpected; and it is, accordingly, with pleasure that I submit the following observations of Schoe. to the consideration of the scholar—“Δᾶ is generally looked on as a dialectic variation of γᾶ; and, in conformity with this opinion, Theocritus has used the accusation Δᾶν. I consider this erroneous, and am of opinion that in Δημητηρ we are rather to understand Δεαμητηρ than Γημητηρ; and δᾶ is to be taken only as an interjection. This is not the place to discuss this matter fully; but, in the meantime, I may mention that Ahrens de dialecta Doricâ, p. 80, has refuted the traditionary notion with regard to δᾶ.
Chorus. With Well., and Schoe., and the MSS., I give this verse to the Chorus, though certainly it is not to be denied that the continuation of the lyrical metre of the Strophe pleads strongly in favour of giving it to Io. It is also certain that, for the sake of symmetry, the last line of the Antistrophe must also be given to the Chorus, as Schoe. has done.
“. . . the sisters of thy father, Io.”
Inachus, the Argive river, was, like all other rivers, the son of Ocean, and, of course, the brother of the Ocean-maids, the Chorus of the present play. Afterwards, according to the historical method of conception, characteristic of the early legends, the elementary god became a human person—the river was metamorphosed into a king.
“. . . Lerne’s bosomed mead.”
We most commonly read of the water or fountain of Lerne; this implies a meadow—and this, again, implies high overhanging grounds, or cliffs, of which mention is made in the twenty-third line below. In that place, however, the reading ἄκρην is not at all certain; and, were I editing the text, I should have no objection to follow Pal. in reading Λέρνης τε κρήνην, with Canter. In fixing this point, something will depend upon the actual landscape.
“First to the east.”
Here begins the narration of the mythical wanderings of Io—a strange matter, and of a piece with the whole fable, which, however, with all its perplexities, Æschylus, no doubt, and his audience, following the old minstrels, took very lightly. In such matters, the less curious a man is, the greater chance is there of his not going far wrong; and to be superficial is safer than to be profound. The following causes may be stated as presumptive grounds why we ought not to be surprised at any startling inaccuracy in geographical detail in legends of this kind:—(1) The Greeks, as stated above, even in their most scientific days, had the vaguest possible ideas of the geography of the extreme circumference of the habitable globe and the parts nearest to it which are spoken of in the passage. (2) The geographical ideas of Æschylus must be assumed as more kindred to those of Homer than of the best informed later Greeks. (3) Even supposing Æschylus to have had the most accurate geographical ideas, he had no reasons in handling a Titanic myth to make his geographical scenery particularly tangible; on the contrary, as a skilful artist, the more misty and indefinite he could keep it the better. (4) He may have taken the wanderings of Io, as Welcker still suggests (Trilog. 137), literally from the old Epic poem “Aigimius,” or some other traditionary lay as old as Homer, leaving to himself no more discretion in the matter, and caring as little to do so as Shakespere did about the geographical localities in Macbeth, which he borrowed from Hollinshed. For all these reasons I am of opinion that any attempt to explain the geographical difficulties of the following wanderings would be labour lost to myself no less than to the reader; and shall, therefore, content myself with noting seriatim the different points of the progress, and explaining, for the sake of the general reader, what is or is not known in the learned world about the matter:—
(1) The starting-point is not from Mount Caucasus, according to the common representation, but from some indefinite point in the northern parts of Europe. So the Scholiast on v. 1, arguing from the present passage, clearly concludes; and with him agree Her. and Schoe.; Welcker whimsically, I think, maintaining a contrary opinion.
(2) The Scythian nomads, vid. [note on v. 2], supra.; their particular customs alluded to here are well known, presenting a familiar ancient analogy to the gipsy life of the present day. The reader of Horace will recall the lines—
“Campestres melius Scythae
Quorum plaustra vagas rite trahunt domos.”
—Ode III. 24-9.
and the same poet (III. 4-35) mentions the “quiver-bearing Geloni”; for the bow is the most convenient weapon to all wandering and semi-civilized warriors.
(3) The Chalybs, or Chaldaei, are properly a people in Pontus, at the north-east corner of Asia Minor; but Æschylus, in his primeval Titanic geography, takes the liberty of planting them to the north of the Euxine.
(4) The river Hubristes. The Araxes, says the Scholiast; the Tanais, say others; or the Cuban (Dr. Schmitz in Smith’s Dict.). The word means boisterous or outrageous, and recalls the Virgilian “pontem indignatus Araxes.”
(5) The Caucasus, as in modern geography.
(6) The Amazons; placed here in the country about Colchis to the northward of their final settlement in Themiscyre, on the Thermodon, in Pontus, east of the Halys.
(7) Salmydessus, on the Euxine, west of the Symplegades and the Thracian Bosphorus; of course a violent jump in the geography.
(8) The Cimmerian Bosphorus, between the Euxine and the Sea of Azof. Puzzling enough that this should come in here, and no mention be made of the Thracian Bosphorus in the whole flight! The word Bosporus means in Greek the passage of the Cow.
(9) The Asian continent; from the beginning a strange wheel! For the rest see below.
“When generations ten have passed, the third.”
This mythical genealogy is thus given by Schütz from Apollodorus. 1. Epaphus; 2. Libya; 3. Belus (see Suppliants, [p. 228], above); 4. Danaus; 5. Hypermnestra; 6. Abas; 7. Proetus; 8. Acrisias; 9. Danae; 10. Perseus; 11. Electryon; 12. Alcmena; 13. Heracles.
“When thou hast crossed the narrow stream that parts.”
I now proceed with the mythical wanderings of the “ox-horned maid,” naming the different points, and continuing the numbers, from the former Note—
(10) The Sounding Ocean.—Before these words, something seems to have dropt out of the text; what the “sounding sea” (πόντου φλ(ο)ισβος) is, no man can say; but, as a southward direction is clearly indicated in what follows, we may suppose the Caspian, with Her.; or the Persian Gulf, with Schoe.
(11) The Gorgonian Plains.—“The Gorgons are conceived by Hesiod to live in the Western Ocean, in the neighbourhood of Night, and the Hesperides; but later traditions place them in Libya.”—Dr. Schmitz, in Smith’s Dict.: but Schoe., in his note, quotes a scholiast to Pindar, Pyth. X. 72, which places them near the Red Sea, and in Ethiopia. This latter habitation, of course, agrees best with the present passage of Æschylus.
With regard to Cisthene, the same writer (Schoe.) has an ingenious conjecture, that it may be a mistake of the old copyists, for the Cissians, a Persian people, mentioned in the opening chorus to the play of the Persians.
(12) The country of the Griffins, the Arimaspi, and the river Pluto. The Griffins and the Arimaspi are well known from Herodotus and Strabo, which latter, we have seen above ([Note 1]), places them to the north of the Euxine Sea, as a sub-division of the Scythians. Æschylus, however, either meant to confound all geographical distinctions, or followed a different tradition, which placed the Arimaspi in the south, as to which see Schoe. “The river Pluto is easily explained, from the accounts of golden-sanded rivers in the East which had reached Greece.”—Schoe.
(13) The river Aethiops seems altogether fabulous.
(14) The “Bybline Heights,” meaning the κατάδουπα (Herod. II. 17), or place where the Nile falls from the mountains.—Lin. in voce καταβασμός, which is translated pass. No such place as Byblus is mentioned here by the geographers, in want of which Pot. has allowed himself to be led, by the Scholiast, into rather a curious error. The old annotator, having nothing geographical to say about this Byblus, thought he might try what etymology could do; so he tells us that the Bybline Mountains were so called from the Byblos or Papyrus that grew on them. This Potter took up and gave—
“Where from the mountains with papyrus crowned
The venerable Nile impetuous pours,”
overlooking the fact that the papyrus is a sedge, and grows in flat, moist places.
“. . . the sacred Nile
Pours his salubrious flood.”
ἔυποτον ρέος, literally, good for drinking. The medicinal qualities of the Nile were famous in ancient times. In the Suppliants, v. 556, our poet calls the Nile water, νόσοις ἄθικτον, not to be reached by diseases; and in v. 835, the nurturing river that makes the blood flow more buoyantly. On this subject, the celebrated Venetian physician, Prosper Alpin, in his Rerum Ægyptiarum, Lib. IV. (Lugd. Bat. 1735) writes as follows: “Nili aqua merito omnibus aliis præfertur quod ipsa alvum subducat, menses pellat ut propterea raro mensium suppressio in Ægypti mulieribus reperiatur. Potui suavis est, et dulcis; sitim promptissime extinguit; frigida tuto bibitur, concoctionem juvat, ac distributioni auxilio est, minime hypochondriis gravis corpus firmum et coloratum reddit,” etc.—Lib. I. c. 3. If the water of the Nile really be not only pleasant to drink, but, strictly speaking, of medicinal virtue, it has a companion in the Ness, at Inverness, the waters of which are said to possess such a drastic power, that they cannot be drunk with safety by strangers.
“. . . thence with mazy course
Tossed hither.”
I quite agree with Schoe. that, in the word παλιμπλάγκτος, in this passage, we must understand πάλιν to mean to and fro, not backwards. With a backward or reverted course from the Adriatic, Io could never have been brought northward to Scythia. The maziness of Io’s course arises naturally from the fitful attacks of the persecuting insect of which she was the victim. A direct course is followed by sane reason, a zigzag course by insane impulse.
“. . . Epaphus, whose name shall tell
The wonder of his birth.”
As Io was identified with Isis, so Epaphus seems merely a Greek term for the famous bull-god Apis.—(Herod. III. 27, and Müller’s Prolegom. myth.) The etymology, like many others given by the ancients, is ridiculous enough; ἐπαφή, touch. This derivation is often alluded to in the next play, The Suppliants. With regard to the idea of a virgin mother so prominent in this legend of Io, Prow. has remarked that it occurs in the Hindoo and in the Mexican mythology; but nothing can be more puerile than the attempt which he mentions as made by Faber to connect this idea with the “promise respecting the seed of the woman made to man at the fall.” Sound philosophy will never seek a distant reason for a phenomenon, when a near one is ready. When an object of worship or admiration is once acknowledged as superhuman, it is the most natural thing in the world for the imagination to supply a superhuman birth. A miraculous life flows most fitly from a miraculous generation. The mother of the great type of Roman warriors is a vestal, and his father is the god of war. Romans and Greeks will wisely be left to settle such matters for themselves, without the aid of “patriarchal traditions” or “the prophecy of Isaiah.” The ancient Hellenes were not so barren, either of fancy or feeling, as that they required to borrow matters of this kind from the Hebrews. On the idea of “generation by a god” generally, see the admirable note in Grote’s History of Greece, P. I. c. 16 (Vol. I. p. 471).
“. . . they are wise who worship Adrastéa.”
“A surname of Nemesis, derived by some writers from Adrastus, who is said to have built the first sanctuary of Nemesis on the river Asopus (Strabo XIII. p. 588), and by others from the verb διδράσκειν, according to which it would signify the goddess whom none could escape.”—Dr. Schmitz. On this subject, Stan. has a long note, where the student will find various illustrative references.
“For wilful strength that hath no wisdom in it
Is less than nothing.”
The word in the original, ἀυθαδιά, literally “self-pleasing,” expresses a state of mind which the Greeks, with no shallow ethical discernment, were accustomed to denounce as the great source of all those sins whose consequences are the most fearful to the individual and to society. St. Paul, in his epistle to Titus (i. 7), uses the same word emphatically to express what a Christian bishop should not be (ἀυθὰδη, self-willed). The same word is used by the blind old soothsayer Tiresias in the Antigone, when preaching repentance to the passionate and self-willed tyrant of Thebes, ἀυθαδιά τοι σκαιότητ ὀφλισκάνει, where Donaldson gives the whole passage as follows:—
“Then take these things to heart, my son; for error
Is as the universal lot of man;
But, whensoe’er he errs, that man no longer
Is witless, or unblest, who, having fallen
Into misfortune, seeks to mend his ways,
And is not obstinate: the stiff-necked temper
Must oft plead guilty to the charge of folly.”
Sophocles, Antig. v. 1028.
“. . . unless some god endure
Vicarious thy tortures.”
The idea of vicarious sacrifice, or punishment by substitution of one person for another, does not seem to have been very familiar to the Greek mind; at least, I do not trace it in Homer. It occurs, however, most distinctly in the well-known case of Menœceus, in Euripides’ play of the Phœnissæ. In this passage, also, it is plainly implied, though the word διάδοχος, strictly translated, means only a successor, and not a substitute. Welck. (Trilog. p. 47) has pointed out that the person here alluded to is the centaur Chiron, of whom Apollodorus (II. 5-11-12) says that “Hercules, after freeing Prometheus, who had assumed the olive chaplet (Welck. reads ἑλόμένον), delivered up Chiron to Jove willing, though immortal, to die in his room (θνήσκειν ὰντ᾽ ἁυτου). This is literally the Christian idea of vicarious death. The Druids, according to Cæsar (b.c. VI. 16), held the doctrine strictly—“pro vita hominis nisi hominis vita reddatur non posse aliter deorum immortalium numen placari.” Of existing heathens practising human sacrifice, the religious rites of the Khonds in Orissa present the idea of vicarious sacrifice in the most distinct outline. See the interesting memoir of Captain Macpherson in Blackwood’s Magazine for August, 1842.
“Seems he not a willing madman,
Let him reap the fruits he sowed.”
I have translated these lines quite freely, as the text is corrupt, and the emendations proposed do not contain any idea worth the translator’s adopting. Schoe. reads—
Τί γὰρ ἐλλείπει μὴ παραπάιειν
Ἐι τάδ ἐπαυχεῖ τί χαλᾷ μανιῶν;
and translates
Was fehlet ihm noch wahnwitzig zo seyn,
Wenn also er pocht? Wie zahmt er die Wuth?
Prow. from a different reading, has
To thee, if this resolve seems good,
Why shouldst thou check thy frenzied mood?