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.”