he exults,—
And feed thy pride on this bare rock,
Filching god's gifts for mortal men. What man
Shall free thee from these woes? Thou hast been called
In vain the Provident:
(pro-vident, same as pro-metheus, he who looks ahead, who provides, the provident.)
had thy soul possessed
The virtue of thy name, thou had'st foreseen
These cunning toils, and had'st unwound thee from them.
Here all depart but Prometheus. Up to this time the Titan has maintained a proud silence. He now breaks into that large invocation which seems still to assault our physical ears across the twenty odd centuries.
O divine Æther, and swift-winged Winds,
And Fountains of the rivers and multitudinous
Laughter of ocean, and thou Earth,
Born mother of us all, and thou bright round
Of the all-seeing Sun, you I invoke!
Behold what ignominy of causeless wrongs
I suffer from the gods, myself a god!
(This, by the way, is one of those passages which our elder poets seem to have regarded as somehow lying outside the pale of moral law—like umbrellas—and which they have therefore appropriated without a thought of blushing. Byron, in Manfred, and Shelley, in his Prometheus Unbound, have quite fairly translated parts of it.)
Enter now a chorus of Oceanides, and these continue throughout the play to perform the functions of exciting sympathy for the Protagonist, and of calling upon him for information when it becomes necessary that the audience should know this and that fact essential to the intelligibility of the action.
For example, after the Oceanides have alighted from their wind-borne car, and have condoled with the sufferer, Æschylus makes them the medium of drawing from Prometheus the recital of his wrongs, and thus of freshly placing that whole tremendous story before the minds of his audience.
Speak now,