Department of the Classics, Harvard University

Zeus, Prometheus, and Greek Ethics

Author(s): Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Source: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 101 (2003), pp. 49-72
Published by: Department of the Classics, Harvard University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3658524
Accessed: 11/01/2009 14:05

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=dchu.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Department of the Classics, Harvard University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Harvard Studies in Classical Philology.

http://www.jstor.org
 ZEUS, PROMETHEUS, AND GREEK ETHICS

HUGHLLOYD-JONES

UCH as the literatureand art of Greece before the time of Plato

have been admired, the notion that the ethics of that period
might have much to teach us would have seemed bizarreto most people
even as late as the nineteenth century. While the aesthetic appeal of
early Greek religion has been uncontested,it has been looked down on
as a superstitionwhich no thinking person could take seriously, and
early Greek thinking has been esteemed only so far as it could be
regarded as a preparationfor the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,
which helped the fathersof the Churchto constructa religious philoso-
phy. Even atheists looked back to Epicureanphilosophy ratherthan to
the ethics of the early Greeks, sharing the general assumption that
progresshad been made since thattime.
Early Greek ethics were very poorly esteemed in the days when the
theory inventedby HermannFrankel' and propagatedby Bruno Snell2
was fashionable. It was believed that since certainwords did not occur
in the Homeric poems, their authoror authorslacked various concepts
indispensable to modem ways of thinking. In particular, it was
believed that Homer had no coherent, articulatedconcept of the self,
and was thereforeincapable of showing how a charactermade a deci-
sion. The doubts about this expressed by some people as early as the
sixties3 were thought highly scandalous;but I do not think we need to
worry about that now, although quite lately an American scholar
1
Dichtung und Philosophie des friihen Griechentums(New York 1951; 2nd edn.
Munich 1962). English translation by Moses Hadas and James Willis, Early Greek
Poetry and Philosophy (New York 1973).
2 Die
Entdeckungdes Geistes (Hamburg1946; 6th edn. 1986). English translationof
the 2nd edn. by T. G. Rosenmeyer,TheDiscovery of the Mind (Oxford 1953).
3 Albin
Lesky, "G6ttlicheund menschliche Motivierungim homerischenEpos,"in SB
der HeidelbergerAkademie, Phil.-Hist. KI. (1961) 4. Abh.; A. A. Long, JHS 90 (1970)
121-139; H. Lloyd-Jones,TheJustice of Zeus (Berkeley 1971; 2nd edn. 1983) ch. 1.
50 HughLloyd-Jones

referred to Merit and Responsibility (1962), by A. W. H. Adkins, an

authorwho accepts Snell's theory and goes on to arguethat Homer has
a wholly inadequateconception of justice and morality, as "a classic
work."4
Nietzsche, of course, had shocked the public duringthe second half
of the nineteenthcenturyby his criticisms of Socrates and Plato and his
advocacy of an outlook clearly indebted to the ethics of pre-Platonic
Greece. But until not so long ago most people thoughtNietzsche hope-
lessly eccentric. As late as 1975, when I brought out an article about
him,5 the Canadianphilosopher George Grant wrote "one looks with
fear as well as pleasure at the praise of Nietzsche from the Regius Pro-
fessor of Greek."6I wonder what ProfessorGrantwould think now that
one of the most distinguishedmoral philosophersof the western world,
Sir Bernard Williams, in his Sather Lectures, entitled Shame and
Necessity,7 has displayed, with much persuasive power, an attitude to
early Greek ethics which has much in common with that of Nietzsche.
"People have missed in Homer,"Williams writes, "a will that revolves
around a distinction between moral and non-moral motivations." To
put it very roughly, for a Christian or a Platonist, there is only one
answerto most ethical problems;but in early Greece a man might legit-
imately hesitate between two or more answers. It is not that the early
Greeks were immoralists;Zeus was believed to have given men justice,
and to punish offenders against her. But they had not the Platonic and
the Christianconception of the soul, and of the natureof evil; they had
no word that correspondsto sin. Zeus was not the only god, and he was
remarkablenot for goodness, but for power, and though he had given
men justice he regardedthem with no special affection. Men did not
have souls as Plato and Christianityhave conceived them, and their
after-life was not in heaven or in hell. The god who loved them was
Prometheus, to whom they did not pray; a character in Menander8
4 See the referencesto this work in The Justice of Zeus (listed in the Index of Modem
Authorson p. 253).
5 TLS,21
February1975 = J. C. O'Flaherty,T. F Sellner, and R. M. Helm eds., Stud-
ies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition(Chapel Hill 1976) = Blood for the Ghosts
(London 1982) 165-181; cf. H. von Staden,"Nietzscheand Marx on GreekArt and Liter-
ature:Case Studies in Reception,"Daedalus, Proceedings of the AmericanAcademy of
Arts and Sciences 105.1 (1976) 79-96.
6 Technologyand Justice (Toronto1986) 79.
7 Sather Classical Lectures57
(Berkeley 1993).
8 Fr. 718 Korte-Thierfelderand Sandbach.
 Zeus, Prometheus, and Greek Ethics 51

remarkedthat all he got out of men was a torch-race. But Williams

finds that the religion of the early Greeks gave them certainadvantages
which are denied to believers in a moralityclosely linked to a belief in
a single eternal and omnipotentdeity, as the morality of most moder
philosophers, including many who are not Platonists or Christians,
certainlyis.
The myth which helps us most to understandthis importantdiffer-
ence between Greek and moder ethics is surely the myth of Prome-
theus, and it may be instructiveto look at it in this light. That myth
figures prominentlyin the Theogony and the Worksand Days of Hes-
iod, and in the tragedyPrometheusBound.
According to Hesiod, men had had an easier time under the rule of
Zeus' father Kronos, when they did not have to work to get a living.
After Zeus had taken over, the special patronof men was not Zeus, but
Prometheus. In the Theogony (507 f.) his father is Iapetos, a son of
Ouranosand Gaia and hence brotherof Kronos and uncle of Zeus; his
motheris Klymene, an Oceanid. In thatpoem (536 f.) Hesiod tells how
at Mekone, at the moment when regular social intercourse between
gods and men came to an end, PrometheustrickedZeus into accepting
the inferior part of the sacrificed beast, and Zeus punished him by
deprivingmen of fire; then Prometheusstole it and gave it to men, and
was punishedby Zeus. In thatpoem fire was importantto men because
without it they could not sacrifice. But Hesiod tells us that Zeus gave
men Dike, who accordingto the Theogonywas his daughterby Themis,
just as Protagorasin the Platonic dialogue that bears his name (322 C)
tells us that Zeus sent Hermes to bring Aidos and Dike to men. Unfor-
tunately Hesiod does not tell us how he came to do so. "Hesiod feels
equally emphatic about Zeus' power and about this justice," writes
FriedrichSolmsen,9"buthe does not feel equally emphaticabout them
all the time; to put it somewhat crudely, the former aspect of his reign
dominates in the Theogony, the latter in the Worksand Days." Also
Zeus gave to mortal kings the OeticrxE?;, according to which they gov-
erned their communities,even as he himself governed the universe;the
word 8iKcrcould signify the order in the universe, or in the various
human communities. Zeus also supportsjustice by punishing men's
crimes, even though the punishmentoften falls not upon the offender
but upon his descendants. In Homer there is nothing about Prome-

9 Hesiod and Aeschylus (Ithaca 1949; reprinted1995) 133.

52 HughLloyd-Jones

theus; but both in the Odysseyand also (althoughless obviously) in the

Iliad, the working of this justice is apparent. Men prayed not to their
patronPrometheus,but to Zeus; he had the power.
One has to be a little careful in taking Hesiod as a guide to the
nature of men's beliefs and their attitudeto the gods. His manner is
that of a peasantpoet writing for peasants, as we see for example in his
semi-comic account of how Zeus punished men for their acquisitionof
fire by creatingwoman. His tricksterPrometheusis not the noble Titan
of the PrometheusBound, and we do not find in his work the high seri-
ousness of epic and of tragedy. In Hesiod fire is importantto men
because without it they cannot sacrifice;in the PrometheusBound it is
importantto them because without it the skills that are necessary for
civilization would have been impossible. In the Theogony,the mother
of Prometheusis Klymene; in the play, she is very significantly Gaia,
unusually equated with Themis, the goddess of divine justice. In Pin-
dar'sIsthmian8.26 f., it is Themis who reveals to Zeus the secret of the
dangerthreateninghim, which in the PV is known to Prometheus.
No surviving author credits Prometheus with having created man
before the fourth century, when he is sometimes said to have created
him out of clay, but already in Hesiod he is the special patron of
mankind, and in the pseudo-Hesiodic Catalogues10he is the father
of Deukalion, the first man after the flood. He must have figuredin the
post-Homeric epic the Titanomachia,which was in all probabilitythe
source of the account of him given by the mythographerApollodorus,
after Pherecydes (FGH 3 F 17).11 But men did not pray to him; there
were cults of him in a few places, but in Athens he had nothing but his
torch-race.
However, we possess one tragedy in which the story of Prometheus
is presented,as it has seemed to most readers,in the grandmannerof a
great poet. But in recent times both the Aeschylean authorshipand the
literaryquality of the play have been questioned, and it seems to me a
matterof capital importanceto determinewhetherthey have been ques-
tioned rightly.
Is the Prometheus Vinctus really the work of Aeschylus? Martin
West, the latest editor of Aeschylus, returnsto this question a decided
10See frr.2 and 4 Merkelbach-West.
11See J. N. Bremmer,"NearEasternand Native Traditionsin
Apollodorus' Account of
the Flood," in F. G. Martinez and G. P. Luttikhuizeneds., Interpretationsof the Flood
(Leiden-Boston 1998) 41 f.
 Zeus, Prometheus, and Greek Ethics 53

'No,' and even if not every doubterhas been quite so positive, during
the last thirty years many people have come to doubt its Aeschylean
authorship.12 The first to doubtit was Alfred Gerckein 1911,13but Wil-
helm Schmid, the learned historian of Greek literature,14got more
attentionwith the argumentagainst authenticitywhich he advancedin
1929. He found a limited numberof supporters;but MarkGriffithwith
his book TheAuthenticityof PrometheusBound (Cambridge1977) fol-
lowed by his commentaryof 1983, has found many. In the same year
O.P. Taplin, in The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford 1977) 240 f.,
argued for the same view; Sir Denys Page15had entertainedserious
doubts as early as 1972, and another doubter was R. P. Winnington-
Ingram.16MartinWest, whose Teubneredition of Aeschylus and Stud-
ies in Aeschylus both appeared in 1990,17 has pronounced himself
(Studies 53) "sincerelypuzzled as to why anyone who reads it with crit-
ical faculties switched on should persist in ascribingit to Aeschylus."
As early as 1938 D. S. Robertsonsuggested (PCPS 169-171 [1938]
9 f.) that Aeschylus may have left the trilogy incomplete, and that some
of the odes were supplied by his sons Euphorionand Euaion, or by his
nephew Philocles; Walther Kranz (Stasimon [1933] 226-228) had
already suggested that the second and third stasimon were not
Aeschylean. West (pp. 68 f.) points out that Euphorionis said to have
won four victories in the tragic competition with plays of his father's
that had not been previously exhibited; he believes that the Desmotes
and the Lyomenos were written by Euphorion and passed off as his
father's. One must agree with West that neither the brief defenses of
Aeschylean authorshipby the late GuntherZuntz (Hermes 111 [1983]
498 f., reiteratedin HSCP 95 [1993] 498 f.) nor the book of MariaPia
Pattoni (L'autenticitadel Prometeo Incatenato di Eschilo [Pisa 1987])
offer an effective defence of authenticity;neitherdoes the vast book of
12The
history of the discussion down to 1966 is well summarizedby IrenaZawadska,
Das Altertum 12 (1966) 210-223 = H. Hommel ed., Wege zu Aischylos II, Wege der
Forschung465.
13Apud B. Laudien,"Berichtiiberden zweiten schlesischen wissenschaftlichenFerien-
kursus,"Zeitschriftfur das Gymnasialwesen65 (1911) 164-174.
14
Untersuchungenzumgefesselten Prometheus(Stuttgart1929).
15On
p. 288 of his text of Aeschylus (Oxford 1972) Page wrote etiam de auctore
Aeschylo dubitatur.
16Studies in
Aeschylus (Cambridge1983) 175 f.
17Both were reviewed me in Gnomon65
by (1993) 1-11 and by Malcolm Davies, CR
42 (1992) 255-263.
54 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

B. Marzullo (I sofismi di Prometeo [Florence 1993]). But one must

take note of a far more effective defence, startingwith a valuable his-
tory of the controversy, in Suzanne Said's Sophiste et tyran, ou le
problemedu Prometheeenchaine (Paris 1985), which West surprisingly
seems not to know.
There can be no doubt that Griffithhas shown that the style and lan-
guage of the play differ a good deal from those of the surviving works
of Aeschylus, and seem closer to those of the tragedies of the thirty
years or so following his death. But if the play is not authentic, it is
remarkablethat no ancient authorseems to have suspected it; the only
surviving tragedy that is generally considered not to belong to the
authorunder whose name it was transmitted,the Rhesus, was suspect
even in antiquity. C. J. Herington,whose book arguing for the play's
authenticity had appeared in 1970, in a careful review of Griffith's
Authenticity18showed how unlikely it is that Aristotle and the Alexan-
drianscholarscan have been mistaken.
In any case, how much do we know about Aeschylus? Seventy-
three plays are listed in the four columns of the catalogue in the
Medicean manuscript;Radt, TrGF5 (1985) 58-59 lists anothereight or
nine. There may have been a fifth column; if so, the numberof plays
will have been ninety. It would appearthat we possess less than ten per
cent of Aeschylus' work. Many great authors,like Shakespeare,have
been capable of writing in very different styles, and we cannot be sure
that Aeschylus was incapableof doing that. Satyr-playsare of course a
differentgenre, but Aeschylus wrote the Diktyoulkoiand the Isthmias-
tai, the fragments of which came as a rude shock to believers in
Aeschylus' quasi-ChristianZeus-religion when they were discovered.
Certainother fragmentsseem to be in a style somewhat differentfrom
the usual style of Aeschylus; Karl Reinhardt19thought this was true of
the papyrusfragmentof the Niobe (fr. 154a Radt), and the same might
be said of the fragmentof the Xantriai or, as I think likelier,20Semele
(fr. 168 Radt) in which Hera appearsdisguised as a begging priestess.
Further,Aeschylus twice visited Sicily, and died there. It has been
18AJP 100
(1979) 420-426; cf. TheAuthorof the "PrometheusBound" (Austin 1970);
see the careful review of this work by T. C. W. Stinton, Phoenix 28 (1974) 258-264 =
Collected Papers on GreekTragedy(Oxford 1990) 91-97.
19"Zur Niobe des Aischylos," Hermes 69 (1934) 233-261 = Tradition und Geist
(Gottingen 1960) 136-166.
20See K. Latte,Philologus 97 (1948) 47 f. = Kl. Schr.(Munich 1968) 477 f.
 Zeus, Prometheus, and Greek Ethics 55

argued that the comparativesimplicity of the language and meters of

the play might have been due to its having been producedin that coun-
try, and also that its staging requiredeffects which could not have been
produced in the Theater of Dionysus but which in Sicily might have
been possible. Also, it is remarkablethat twenty-two lines of a speech
of Prometheus(351-372) are devoted to a descriptionof Typhos under
Mount Etna. Those lines closely resemble a passage in Pindar's
Pythian 1.13-28; some have arguedfor a common source, but it is eas-
ier to suppose that one of the poets, probablythe tragedian,knew the
work of the other. Pindar,like Aeschylus, visited Sicily as the guest of
Hieron of Syracuse. Indeed a later tragediancould have modeled a pas-
sage on Pindar'swork, but one is temptedto suspect that Aeschylus did
so because he had been in Sicily, quite possibly at the same time as
Pindar. Certainlywe ought to regardthe authenticityof the play with
caution;but are we obliged to share West's very positive view that it is
spurious?
But even if it is not by Aeschylus, which one must agree is possible,
great importanceattaches to what we learn about a legend of special
significance for the understandingof Greek religion and of early Greek
ethics from a tragedywhich as we see from allusions in the Birds21was
certainly well known in Athens well before the end of the fifth century.
But West's certaintyrests partly on his very low estimate of the play's
quality and his disapprovalof its theology, and here I am altogether
unable to follow him. "Its authorwrites iambics well," he writes, "and
he has considerable powers of imagination and description. But his
construction of scenes and of the play as a whole is inept, differing
from Aeschylus not just in accomplishment but in conception and
approach. His theology is irreligious;the story does not inspire him to
any but the most shallow and trivial moralreflection. He is a gifted but
brainlesspoet workingwith the literarytechniques,stage resources,and
sophistic outlook of the 440's or 430's." Let us consider some of the
argumentsby which West supports this view. One hesitates to differ
with markedemphasis from the authorof so many learned works, but
fortunatelyI can be certain that he agrees with me that in the effort to
21 See N. Dunbar,
Aristophanes, Birds (Oxford 1995) Index s.v. PrometheusBound.
The Prometheusscene (Birds 1494 f.) makes it difficultto doubt that the play was known
to Athenian audiences in 414 B.C. Knights 758-759 may be an echo of PV 59; see
P. Groeneboom'snote on that passage in his commentaryon the PV (Aeschylus' Prome-
theus [Groningen1928] 96).
56 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

find out the truth one should not shrink from expressing marked dis-
agreementeven with an old associate.
West has constructeda "typology"to which all plays of Aeschylus
other than the Prometheusconform. The Prometheus,he says (p. 55),
"does not fit into this patternin any way. The four-partscheme of anxi-
ety-clarification-denouement-adjustment is inapplicableto it." I should
be surprisedif all the tragediesthat Aeschylus wrote fittedinto this pat-
tern, and it is not easy to see how a play with this particularsubject
could be made to do so.
"It will not do," West writes (p. 56), "to say that this peculiar struc-
ture is determined by the peculiar nature of the story. It was the
author'sown choice to have Prometheusbound at the startof a play; he
could just as easily have had him led away in bondage at the end of one
play and startedthe next where Lyomenosstarts,a shorttime before his
release by Heracles."True, the author could have started the Prome-
theus in anotherway; but to me the prologue with the splendid opening
and the binding, accompanied by the exchanges between Kratos and
Hephaestus,seem particularlyeffective, as it has to many people before
me. Once the poet had Prometheusbound, there he was, and for the
time being had no one to talk to except the chorusof Oceanids and such
gods and humansas might make their way to the remote Caucasus.
There has been much discussion of the difficulty of representingthe
binding, and anyone who credits the productions of tragedies with a
high degree of naturalism may find in this an indication of non-
Aeschylean authorship;but is it safe to do this? Suzanne Said (Sophiste
et tyran 47) has done well to remind us of some words of A. M. Dale
(Collected Papers [1969] 119):22 "since these texts were written for
performance,not with the idea of helping a reading public to visualize
the scene, or even of helping a subsequentproducerto stage a correct
revival,the most precise indicationsoften concern, somewhatparadoxi-
cally, what was invisible to the audience, or visible in so rudimentarya
form that they needed help in interpretingwhat they saw."
"Theprologue,"West complains (p. 54), "does not fit into the typol-
ogy representedby what is known of Aeschylus' work. Its extensive
use of dialogue, with all three actors on stage, is much more like
Sophoclean technique, as is the character-contrastbetween the 'hard'
22
They come from her inaugurallecture of 1960 at BirkbeckCollege, entitled "Words,
Music and Dance."
 Zeus, Prometheus, and Greek Ethics 57

Kratos and the 'soft' Hephaestus."The dialogue between Kratos and

Hephaestus is surely most effective, ratherlike the dialogues between
Pelasgos and the leader of the chorus of Danaids in the Supplices and
between Apollo and the leader of the chorus in the trial scene of the
Eumenides. Did the poet really have to wait for Sophocles before he
could do it in this way?
In Prometheus' first monologue (88 f.), according to West, "the
Titan vacillates absent-mindedlybetween despair ... and confidence
that he knows exactly what is going to happen. A Medea may go
throughsuch dramaticshifts of mood, but Aeschylean charactershave a
pretty steady idea of their standpoint in any given scene." Yet one
recalls that Pelasgos in the Supplices has some difficulty in making up
his mind as to how to receive the supplicationof the Danaids, and that
Electra in the scene that follows the parodos of the Choephoroi is
uncertain what to do about her commission, and that later when she
sees the footprints she is once more thrown into indecision; on both
occasions she consults the Chorus. Prometheusknows that he has a
secret which will one day win him his release; but his present situation
is uncomfortable,and is likely to continue so for a long space of time.
In such a situation, what West calls his vacillation seems to me very
naturaland by no means "absent-minded."
Next comes the entry of the Chorus. As to their means of arrival,the
individual winged cars argued for by Eduard Fraenkel23are surely
preferableto the omnibus. Their entry and that of Oceanus on his grif-
fin have been thoughtby some people to help the case for Sicilian pro-
duction; Hieron's considerable resources may have made possible
effects that would not have been easy in the Theaterof Dionysus; but in
any case what degree of naturalismin stage effects can we assume?
In tragedy in general the Chorus is not the mouth-piece of the poet
or of the gods, but an actor in the drama.24In two surviving plays of
Aeschylus the individuality of the chorus is particularlymarked. In
the Supplices the passionate determinationof the Danaids and in the
Eumenides that of the Erinyes are unmistakable,as are the feminine
sympathy and lacrimosity of the Theban women of the Seven and
the Trojanprisonersof the Choephoroi,and the elders of the Persae and
23ASNP, serie II, 23 (1954) 269-284 = Kleine Beitrdge zur Klassischen Philologie I
(Rome 1964) 389-404.
24See GerhardMiiller, "Chorund
Handlungbei den griechischenTragikern,"in Hans
Diller ed., Sophokles, Wegeder Forschung95 (1967) 212-238.
58 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

the Agamemnonare likewise very clearly characterized. As cousins of

Prometheus,the Oceanids are a suitablechoice, capable of deep sympa-
thy and of the courage we can expect from daughtersof Oceanus. It
was surely regularfor the nature of the chorus to determine the style
and meter of its utterances,and this might explain why the characterof
the Oceanids is different from that of any other Aeschylean chorus
known to us. Also, the simplermeters of the lyrics, doubtlessrelatedto
their music, may well have been chosen out of considerationfor a cho-
rus which was Sicilian and not Athenian. The parodos takes the form
of a dialogue between Prometheusand the chorus, a form that is not
unusualin later tragediesbut is not found in surviving Aeschylus. It is
effective here; the sympatheticnature of the nymphs, the ruthlessness
of Zeus and the agony, the resolution and the determinationof Prome-
theus are powerfully brought out. Already Prometheus alludes to his
possession of a secret that one day will win him his release.
The first epeisodion begins with Prometheus' account of how the
Titans rejected his advice to use cunning ratherthan violence in their
struggle against Zeus, how in consequence togetherwith his mother,in
this play Gaia, now significantlyidentified with Themis, he took Zeus'
side and enabled him to win, as Themis does in Hesiod, and how Zeus
planned to exterminatethe human race, but was preventedby Prome-
theus. One would dearly like to know how the poet imagined that Pro-
metheus was able to preventit; was it by protectingDeukalion? There
are several stories connecting Prometheus with the great flood, from
which Deukalion and his wife Pyrrhasurvivedand ensuredthe continu-
ance of the human race.25In The East Face of Helicon (Oxford 1997)
493, West observes that there may have been an account of the
Deukalion myth in the Titanomachia. According to Apollodorus 1.7.2
Prometheuswas Deukalion's father, and Stephanie West26has argued
that the figure of Prometheusin the Desmotes was modelled on that of
Ea in the Akkadianepic Atrahasis. Surely we must agree that, as West-
phal pointed out in 1869,27 Prometheus' account of previous events
makes strongly against the notion that the Desmotes was the second
play of a trilogy.
In the stichomythia that follows this monologue, Prometheus tells
the Chorus how he gave mortals hope. Before then, it would seem,
25For a
bibliographysee Bremmer(above, n. 11) 40 n. 9.
26"Prometheus
Orientalized,"MH 54 (1994) 129-149; cf. Bremmer(above, n. 11).
27
Prolegomenazu Aeschylus Tragodien(Leipzig 1869) 206 f.
 Zeus, Prometheus,and GreekEthics 59

men knew when they were going to die; Elias Canetti in his play The
Numberedgives a vivid pictureof the disagreeableeffects of this condi-
tion. Then he tells them that he has given men fire, from which they
will learn many priceless arts. After he has told them that he will be
released only when Zeus pleases, the leader of the chorus declares that
he has made a mistake, and urges him to try to find a means of escape.
West complains that "this last admonitionseems thoroughlyillogical."
"How does the good nymph expect Prometheusto seek deliverance,"he
continues, "when she has just declared that there is no hope of Zeus'
relenting?" But has she? I suppose he is thinking of 184-185, where
the Chorus has declared that Zeus has dariXrlia iiea and Kiap
&atapduvoov; but that hardly justifies West's patronizing tone. He
finds it surprisingthat Prometheus urges the Chorus to listen to his
story in an "extraordinarilyimpassioned"way, and he does not under-
stand how their listening will be of advantageto him. I should have
thoughtthat the reason for Prometheus'emotion was clear enough, and
I do not agree with West that his words were "incapableof generating
any dramatictension or momentum." At this point Oceanus, as West
puts it, "obtrudeshimself." Like his daughtershe is a relation;he is a
brotherof Iapetos, who in the Theogony is Prometheus' father, but if
Prometheusis a son of Gaia, Oceanus is presumablyhis brother. West
(p. 56) complains that he "brings no news, illumination, or advance-
ment." But it is surely understandablethat he has come to offer to
intercedewith Zeus, and he urges Prometheusto restrainhis anger and
to moderatehis language. Prometheus'reply to his first speech begins
as follows:

~riX&o' 6OVVE?K' ait(Xia;S

i?KTO; KcOp
dvTxcov
gieaoaxv KaOiTexoXgirKob;
tgoi (330-331).

These lines present a textual problem. How can the force of the pgea-
in gEraoXcovcarry over to the second participleT?eoXwI,KCtg? This is
enough to make the text suspect. J. D. Denniston, CR 47 (1933) 164
proposed to emend this to o'"
ndvXtovgeTxaoXev TeToXr0kglcK; ?gOi,
giving the sense "I envy you because you are free from blame, not hav-
ing dared to share in everythingwith me." The corruptioncould easily
have happened. The general sense is then a good deal better; if
Oceanus had shared in Prometheus' enterprise,he would hardly have
remained undetected, and he would hardly be in a good position to
60 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

intercede with Zeus and to claim (338-339) that his intercession is

likely to succeed, a claim which West finds incomprehensible,as any-
one may well do if like the last two editors he retains the manuscript
readingin 331. It would also be easier to understandthe coldness with
which Prometheusrejects Oceanus' offer; note in particular342-343
,daqV ....ovTiOEt, ? tI Kcal OVwev 0xEt;.
I have alreadypointed out that it may be significantthat Prometheus
in this scene devotes twenty-two lines (351-372) to a description of
Typhos under Etna, a description closely resembling Pindar's Pythian
1.15-28. If one believes that Oceanus was not an accomplice in Pro-
metheus' plot, it is easier to understandthe dialogue that concludes the
scene (373-396). Zeus is too angry to be reasoned with, and Prome-
theus does not wish his relativeto incurthe wrathof Zeus. West (p. 58)
finds that the scene ends "on a note of ludicrousbathos." "Inten lines,"
he writes, "Oceanus has changed from a determined benefactor to a
nervous poltroon who cannot wait to get home." What has changed
Oceanus' attitude is what Prometheus says at 386, where the text is
uncertainand the sense not easy to determine. After Prometheushas
told him that Zeus is too angry to be reasonedwith, Oceanus asks what
is the harm in trying, and Prometheus replies that he is wasting his
effort and his kindness is foolish. Oceanusreplies, "Allow me to suffer
from that disease, since one gains from being thoughtfoolish when one
is sensible." If with the Medicean and most of the manuscriptsone
reads g6ov 5oici'qt Tx&gaXacjdg' etvat, the meaning will be "People
will think that I am making that mistake." What is the meaning of "that
mistake"? Presumablythe point is "I will be thought foolish." At that
point Oceanus sees that it is impossible to persuadePrometheus. Pro-
metheus then makes it clear that he does not want his well-wisher to
suffer because of him, and Oceanus acknowledgesthe dangerby point-
ing to Prometheus' own fate. Everything is clear, provided one does
not imagine Oceanus to be insincere, or like Taplin (Stagecraft 262)
believe that "he seems a dull, foolish and ineffectual old man,"a view
which seems to me totally mistaken. Oceanus has shown courage in
making his offer-if he is insincere, why should he make it at
all?-and he has behaved with perfect dignity. The scene has
admirablyachieved its purpose of bringing out the pride, courage, and
obstinacy of Prometheus. I see no "ludicrousbathos"in his allusion to
his mode of transport,which is appropriateto the divine status of
 andGreekEthics
Zeus,Prometheus, 61

the person concerned and to the early period of mythical history in

which this play is situated.
The first stasimon (397-435) in Griffith's words "provides a lyric
response to Prometheus'account of his sufferingin the previous scene,
and serves to deepen the mood of elemental pain and misery surround-
ing the Titan." It surely does this most effectively, apartfrom the third
strophicpair (if it is a strophicpair) at 425-435, which is certainlycor-
rupt and perhaps,as many scholars, including Griffith,have suspected,
interpolated.
At 436 Prometheus,as West puts it, resumes his autobiography.His
distress is all the greater because he can claim the credit for having
placed the younger gods in power. He tells the Chorus how he taught
mortalsthe building of houses, the interpretationof the stars, numbers,
writing, the control of beasts of burden and of horses, ship-building.
When he follows this with the complaintthat he, the authorof all these
devices, cannot find a scheme that could release him from his agony,
West proteststhat he is well awarethathe possesses a valuablebargain-
ing counter. But the time for that lies in the future, and Prometheusis
speaking of his "presentpain." Prometheuscontinues, telling how he
introducedmedicine, divination,and the discovery of precious metals.
The Choruswarnshim not to take more care of mortalsthan of him-
self, and expresses the hope that one day he will be released and be no
less strong than Zeus. West is severe upon the poet for allowing the
Oceanids this exaggeration. Prometheus replies that it is only after
enduring many pains that he is fated to be released; his skill is far
weaker than Necessity (Anangke). Who controls Anangke? The Fates
and the Erinyes. Is Zeus weaker than they? He could not escape what
is fated. One remembershow in the Iliad 16.431 f. Zeus thinks of sav-
ing his son Sarpedonfrom death, but Hera reminds him that he cannot
set a precedent by saving a mortal, long since condemned by fate. Is
Zeus fated to rule for ever? Here Prometheusrefuses to be questioned
further.
Now comes what West calls "the irruptionof the distraughtIo."
This person has great importance in another play of Aeschylus, the
Supplices;in that play she who has at first appearedas a miserablevic-
tim of Zeus' lust finally becomes a highly privileged beneficiary of
Zeus. "Similarities of conception, imagery and verbal detail," wrote
R. D. Murrayin his valuablestudy of TheMythof lo in Aeschylus' Sup-
pliants (1958) 49, "conduceto the belief that the two dramasbelong to
62 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

the same period, or that the poet wrote the second with vivid reminis-
cence of the earlier." This is true, and anyone who doubts the authen-
ticity of the PV would do well to rereadthe Supplicescarefully with the
PV in mind. Io's firstutterancesare surely worthyof Aeschylus; speak-
ing of the gadfly which is the ghost of Argos, Io utters the marvelous
dochmiacdimeter,

6 8E iropEC'
eat 86tov 0({I' Sxov
ov oi)e KarOavovTayaia K?e0Eic(569-570),

perhaps the most uncanny lines in all Greek literature. After Prome-
theus has identified her, it is scarcely surprisingif the distraughtIo
questions him about her plight before he has answered her request to
tell her his name; but West complains that "again the poet's crude art
fails to conceal art." After the end of the lyric utterances,Prometheus
promises to tell Io what she wants to know; West scolds the poet for
making Prometheuspromise to speak frankly as one does to friends.
"Is it just that he likes all mortals?"he asks; but Prometheusknows that
this mortal is like himself a victim of Zeus, and that she will be the
ancestress of the man who will release him. The following dialogue
(613-642) is in West's opinion "a particularlygood specimen of this
author'sfumbling." Prometheusnow tells Io his name, but he declines
to tell her why he is being punished. West complains that he has
promisedto tell her everything;but she has asked him to tell her what is
in store for her, not to tell her about himself. Prometheuswarns her
that this will be distressing. West imagines that the audience will have
thought "At last! What shilly-shallying!";but was the audience quite
so unimaginative? At this point the Oceanids interruptbefore Prome-
theus tells her of her wanderingsin the future to ask Io to tell of her
wanderingsin the past. West hears the ghost of Aeschylus murmuring
"How can anyone think I wrote this stuff?" I should have thought that
anyone who was accustomedto the techniquesof early epic and tragic
poetry would feel that the poet has managed the transitionsfrom one
narrativeto another in a perfectly acceptable fashion, and would not
talk down to them from the viewpoint of an altogetherirrelevantmod-
ern realism. In fact they serve a poetic purpose, being well calculated
to keep the audiencein a state of suspense.
Even West concedes that "once embarked on the narrative(from
642), the poet writes excellently." Indeed, the description of the
 Zeus, Prometheus, and Greek Ethics 63

uncannyvisions, the demandsof the oracles for Io's expulsion from the
palace, her transformation,the guardianshipof Argos and his sudden
end and her pursuitby the gadfly are surely memorablepoetry. But at
683-704, West tells us with unrelentingrealism, the poet "plungesonce
more into a morassof fussy arrangements."To me, however,the transi-
tional passage, containing as it does the passionate reaction of the
Oceanidsto Io's narrative,seems to have been ratherwell managed.
There follows (707 f.) Prometheus' description of Io's future wan-
derings. Geographicalnarrativeappearsto have been a standarddevice
of early tragedy; it figured in the Lyomenos as well as the Desmotes.
The beacon speech of the Agamemnonis an instance of this, in this case
made doubly effective by the device of making Clytemnestraspeak as
though the fires lit at the successive stations were a single flame, thus
suggesting the notion of the movement of a fire of vengeance. Another
instance is the scene in the Supplices in which Pelasgos outlines to the
Danaids the boundariesof his kingdom (249 f.), and in his next speech
(277 f.) explains his skepticism about the claim of the Danaids to
Argive descent by enumerating no less than six dark-skinnedraces
whose members they resemble. In the first stasimon of the same play
(538 f.) the Chorus describe Io's own wanderings at considerable
length. Just so Sophocles in his early play Triptolemosmade Demeter
describe to Triptolemosin some detail the route he was to take and the
peoples to whom he was to explain the nature of agriculture. This
reminded Strabo28of the way in which Dionysus in the prologue of
Euripides'Bacchae lists the peoples he has visited in orderto introduce
the culture of the vine. Like the catalogues of warriorsin the Persae
and the Seven Against Thebes, not to mention the messenger's speech
in Euripides' Phoenissae, this kind of thing would appear to be a
descendant of the catalogues of countries and of heroes found in epic
literature.
It must, I think, be grantedthat this particularspeech of Prometheus
is a fine piece of work, bringing home to the audience the torments
which Io is to endure;not surprisinglyshe turnsto thoughts of suicide.
Next West complains that the poet "makesone of his abruptchanges of
subject";but surely he manages the transitionskillfully by making Io's
words remindPrometheusthat in his own case suicide is not an option,
so that nothing can release him but the fall of Zeus. That causes the
28 1.2.20
p. 27 C. (1.29.23 Aly).
64 HughLloyd-Jones

Chorus to ask if the fall of Zeus is really possible. It could only be

averted, Prometheusreplies, if he himself were to be released. "Who
shall release you," Io asks, "if Zeus is unwilling?"; and Prometheus
tells her that it is fated to be one of her own descendants, in the thir-
teenth generationafter her. Then the poet employs anotherof the tran-
sitional devices which vex West so much; Prometheusgives Io a choice
between hearingthe rest of her ordeal and hearingwho is to set Prome-
theus free, and then the Choruspersuadehim to grantIo the first favor
and themselves the second. I wonder if you are thinking "Whatis this,
a party game?,"as West thinks the audience will have been thinking at
this point;he goes on to amplify his objectionat some length.
Prometheus now describes Io's future wanderings; she will pass
Gorgons, Graiai,griffins, and Arimaspians,and come to Ethiopia,from
where the Nile will guide her into Egypt. In orderto prove to her that
he is no vain prophet, he then describes her wanderings in the past,
throughMolossia and Dodona and to the sea that is to bear her name.
At CanobusZeus will restore her sanity, and she will bear Epaphos. It
seems to me significantthat he tells at considerablelength the story of
the Danaids, a story to which Aeschylus devoted a trilogy in which he
presentsIo's story in some detail and in a way not at all unlike the ver-
sion in the Desmotes. About the valiantarcherwho is to release him he
now says little. Now the gadfly renews its attacks, Io's madness
returns,and she departs.
This leads the Oceanids to sing the third stasimon (887 f.), in which
they meditate on the danger presented by a sexual partner of over-
whelming power, and express the hope that they will never arouse the
desire of Zeus. Griffith,in his commentaryof 1983 (p. 243), writes of
this chorus: "It would have been easy enough to use ambiguous lan-
guage, to suggest the possible danger to Zeus of such marriages
(therebyputtingus in mind of Thetis); but no such hints are to be heard
in this ode." But would the hints have been necessary? It seems to me
significant that the person who represents a danger to Zeus is in this
play not Metis, as in the Theogony 886 f., but, as in Pindar'sIsthmian
8.26 f., Thetis, who happensto be an Oceanid. In the later stages of the
Danaid trilogy, one particularDanaid assumes a special importance;
this is Hypermnestra,who unlike her sisters spares her husband, is
prosecutedby her father and defended by Aphrodite,and will become
the ancestress of very important descendants, including Herakles.
Thetis was certainly mentioned in the Lyomenos (fr. 202b Radt), in a
 Zeus, Prometheus,and GreekEthics 65

tantalizing but very lacunose fragment from Philodemus' De pietate,

quoted by Radt ad loc. It would seem not unlikely that in this trilogy
also one member of the group that supplied the chorus of the first play
took on special prominence, and that this explains why the Chorus in
the thirdstasimondwells on the dangerof being attractiveto Zeus.
After the scene with Io Prometheus is carried away by pride and
resentment, and in a speech of magnificent defiance (907 f.) he pro-
claims that the curse of Kronos will be fulfilled and Zeus will be over-
whelmed by his formidable son. In a stichomythia of which every
word is to the point, the Chorusfirst suggest that he is describingwhat
he would like to happen, but Prometheusdeclares that it is also what
will happen. Will Zeus be masteredby another? Yes, he will endure
tormentseven worse than these. Is Prometheusnot afraidto utter such
words? "Why should I be afraid,"he answers, "I who am immortal?"
The Chorus remind him that Zeus could make his ordeal even worse.
"Well, let him do it!" Prometheus replies, "I can expect anything."
"Wise,"reply the Chorus, "are they who pay reverence to Nemesis."
"Do reverence, pray, fawn on whoever has the power!" says Prome-
theus, "forZeus I care less than nothing! Let him act, let him rule as he
pleases for this brief space of time! He shall not rule over the gods for
long."
West (p. 63) finds that Prometheus'altercationwith Hermes, partic-
ularly the stichomythia964-986, is largely an unedifying exchange of
insults, which at times reach a childish level. "The play,"he continues,
"is often admiredfor the grandeurof its theme, the cosmic setting, and
vast time-scale. But the personnel are a petty-minded crew who
scarcely measure up to their environmentand status." As I see it, it is
not in the play that the childishness and the petty-mindednessare to be
found. But the main fault which West finds in the scene with Hermesis
in the portrayalof the Chorus; up to now they have been timid crea-
tures, who see no good in any opposition to Zeus, but now they bravely
defy Hermes and volunteerto share the fate of Prometheus."Dramati-
cally effective it may be," writes West, "butit is still a typical example
of this author'sreadiness to change his characters'standpointad hoc
without giving a thought to consistency. Aeschylus would have
planned things much more carefully." However, sensitivity and anx-
iousness can go together with courage, and these relations of his,
daughtersof a Titan, have already given abundantproof of their deep
sympathywith Prometheus. WaltherKranz,Stasimon(1933) 171, 222,
66 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

226 has drawnattentionto otherbehavioron the partof tragic choruses

which may be thought to exhibit psychological inconsistency. The
nearest thing to this in Aeschylus is the behavior of the chorus of
women in the Seven, at first deeply distressed at the city's danger,but
later firm in remonstratingwith Eteocles on account of his determina-
tion to fight his brother. A celebratedcase of this kind of thing is found
in a much later tragedy,the Iphigenia in Aulis, where Aristotle (Poetics
1454a) remarkedon the anomalia of the heroine's change of attitude.29
West (p. 64) finds that the lyrics of this play are "agreeablebut vacu-
ous little songs," surpassed "in depth of thought as well as in poetic
power"by all otherodes of Aeschylus; he gives a summaryof the senti-
ments expressed in them which is designed to bring out what he calls
their banality. It seems to me that the lyrics are characteristicof the
Oceanids, just as the lyrics of the Supplices are characteristicof the
Danaids and those of the Eumenides are characteristicof the Erinyes.
Much ink has been spilt over the problemof how the Choruswas made
to disappear."Ne s'agit-il pas,"writes Suzanne Said (Sophiste et tyran
53), "d'unfaux problemequi ne se pose qu'a partirdu moment ou nous
pretons aux spectateursantiques une exigence de realisme qui est en
fait la notre?"
The theology of the play, West tells us (p. 53) is "irreligious." He
argues (p. 63) that "it is hard to imagine Aeschylus choosing to let us
see things so completely from the viewpoint of a rebel against Zeus,
without giving hints throughthe chorus or throughother speakersthat
thereis anotherside to the story." It would seem thatthe once prevalent
belief in an Aeschylean exalted Zeus-religion, in which Zeus became
somethinglike the Christiangod,30is so deeply rooted in some people's
minds that they cannot understandthat it is hardly surprisingthat his
behavior when his power was threatened should seem ruthless and
tyrannical. The account in the Agamemnon (167 f.) of how Ouranos
was worsted by Kronos and Kronosby Zeus is wholly in harmonywith
this. But it is impossible to discuss the theology of the Desmotes with-
29Such
changes of attitudeare dealt with by Albin Lesky in Antidosis: Festschriftfiir
W Kraus (Vienna 1972) 209-226; BernardKnox, GRBS7 (1966) 213-232 = Wordand
Action (Baltimore 1979) 231-249; and in more detail John Gibert, Change of Mind in
GreekTragedy,Hypomnemata106 (1995) 226 f; for this scene in particular,see p. 65.
30 On which see Lloyd-Jones, "Zeus in Aeschylus,"JHS 76 (1956) 55-67 = Academic
Papers I (Oxford 1990) 238-261 (German translation by Brigitte Mannsperger in
H. Hommel ed., Wegezu Aischylos, Wegeder Forschung87 [1974] 265-300).
 Zeus, Prometheus,and GreekEthics 67

out taking account of the fragmentsof the Lyomenos,of the other rele-
vant fragments,and of the problem of the trilogy, if indeed there was a
trilogy.
We have fragments,including a notable choral lyric passage, of the
Prometheus Pyrkaeus; but that we know to have been the satyr-play
accompanyingthe trilogy to which the Persae belonged. The catalogue
in the Medicean manuscript mentions a Prometheus Pyrphoros, and
some people, including Griffithin his commentary,have believed that
this was the first play of the trilogy. But since Westphal in 186931
pointed out that Prometheus' narration of past history in the first
epeisodion indicates that the Desmotes was the first play of the trilogy,
most scholars have taken that view. It seems clear that the Lyomenos,
which is surely by the same author,followed the Desmotes. Zeus has
now released the other Titans, who form the chorus, having arrivedto
visit Prometheusearly in the play (frr. 190 and 193). Every third day
Prometheus'liver is again eaten by the eagle. The scholia on Apollo-
nius 2.1248 agree with Apollodorus 2.5.11 in telling how Herakles
came to the Caucasuson his way to fetch the golden apples of the Hes-
perides; they cite Pherecydes on the parentage of Prometheus' eagle
(FGH 3 F 7), and it seems not unlikely that Apollodorus' account of
Herakles' journey is based on that writer;32who may well have fol-
lowed the Titanomachia. It is clear that Prometheus gave Herakles
directions;it was on his advice that Heraklesdid not go himself to fetch
the apples, but sent Atlas to do so while he held up the sphere. We
have several fragmentsfrom this scene which come from geographical
catalogues like those in the Desmotes and in Sophocles' Triptolemos.
At what stage Herakles shot the eagle is uncertain. We have only the
one line of his prayerto Apollo to make the arrowgo straight;but it has
been suggested that he shot the bird to rewardPrometheusfor having
given him directions. According to a scholion on Virgil Ecl. 6.42, Her-
akles afterkilling the eagle was at first afraidto release Prometheusfor
fear of offending his father;it looks as if he learned how Prometheus
came to be there only after having killed the eagle. But later Prome-
theus deterredZeus from intercoursewith Thetis, warning him of the
danger, and then Zeus rewardedhim by releasing him, accepting Chi-
ron's renunciationof immortalityin favor of Prometheusand obliging

31 See
above, n. 27.
32See above, n. 11.
68 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

him to wear a wreath and a ring in memory of his captivity. In the

Desmotes (1026 f.) Hermes has told Prometheus that he cannot be
released unless another immortal renounces his immortality in his
favor. Chiron, of course, was not one of the ordinarycentaurs sprung
from Ixion's intercourse with the cloud, but a son of Kronos by the
nymphPhilyra,and thereforehalf-brotherto Zeus and cousin to Prome-
theus. It looks very much as if Herakles helped to arrangethe settle-
ment; as a favorite son of Zeus by a mortal woman, close enough to
Zeus to be said to have fought for the gods against the giants, he was a
person particularlywell qualified to do so. But did not Prometheus
extract from Zeus as part of the settlement some benefit for men? In
the Desmotes (187 f.) the Chorus says that Zeus "keepsTx 8IcKaovby
himself"; Hesiod (Op. 279), like Protagorasin Plato, tells us that Zeus
gave Dike to men, and says much about her function. Both in the
Odysseyand in the Iliad, it is clear that in a general way Zeus sees to it
that Dike prevails among men. Surely in the Prometheustrilogy this
came about as part of the settlement with Prometheus. I would prefer
not to say that the characterof Zeus "developed,"but ratherthat altered
circumstances caused him to change his policy. Wilamowitz (Der
Glaube der Hellenen II [1932] 134; cf. Winnington-Ingram,Studies
[above, n. 16] 180) helpfully pointed to the analogy of the altered atti-
tude of the Eumenides.
Some people have thought that the Prometheus Pyrphoros men-
tioned in the catalogue in the Medicean manuscriptand in two quota-
tions (frr.208 and 208a) was the thirdplay of the trilogy. But if all this
was part of the Lyomenos,it is hard to see how there can have been a
thirdplay to follow, and PrometheusPyrphorosmay have been another
way of referringto PrometheusPyrkaeus. Can there have been a dil-
ogy? There is no evidence that such a thing existed. Of course the tril-
ogy might never have been completed. But may there not have been a
third play which did not have Prometheusin its title? Here we are in
the dark;but I cannot help mentioning a guess of my own, cautiously
put forwardin my book The Justice of Zeus33 97 f. This was that the
thirdplay of the trilogy was the Aitnaiai (Womenof Etna). We possess
a remarkablepapyrus fragment of Aeschylus, published in 1952 (fr.
281a Radt;cf. fr. 451n), in which Dike herself is found talking with the
chorus of the play, which seems to consist of citizens of a city to which

33See above, n. 3.
 Zeus, Prometheus, and Greek Ethics 69

she has been sent. Since Zeus overthrewKronos, she says, he has done
her honor; for Kronos had been the aggressor in their quarrel,so that
she had been on Zeus' side. Zeus sends her, she continues, to those
whom he desires to benefit. EduardFraenkelin 195434suggested that
this came from the Womenof Etna, which Aeschylus, accordingto the
ancient life of him,35wrote "as an omen of a good life" for the citizens
of the new city of Aitna, founded by Hieron, and producedhimself in
Sicily. The suggestion that the Prometheus trilogy was produced in
Sicily was first made by Droysen in 1832, was revived by Bergk in
1884 and by Koertein 1920, and was arguedwith learningand ingenu-
ity by FriedrichFocke in 1930.36It was Focke who pointed out that the
difficulties of staging might have been lessened if the play was not per-
formed in Athens, and that the comparative simplicity of the lyrics
might be explained if they were sung by a Sicilian and not by an Athe-
nian chorus. He also observed that the long passage about Typhos
under Etna in the Desmotes, closely resembling a passage in the ode
that Pindar composed for the celebration of the founding of the new
city, called Aitna, would have been most appropriatein a Sicilian pro-
duction. Supposing that in the LyomenosZeus promised to send Dike
among men, he might well have sent her first to Sicily, inhabited by
such savage races as the Cyclopes and the Laestrygones. The latter
were located at Leontini, one of the places at which partof the action of
the Aitnaiai took place.37 The Laestrygones who killed some of
Odysseus' crew were a mere remnant, most having been killed by
Herakles when he came after the cattle of Geryones. Diodorus, who
came from Agyrion, near Leontini, says that it was in this region that
Herakleswas first worshippedas a god. Perhapsthe Laestrygoneswere
unwelcoming to Dike, so that Herakles was obliged to deal with them.
It may not be irrelevant that according to Pausanias 9.25 the two
Kabeiroiin the Theban cult, to whom Demeter entrustedits mysteries,
were Prometheusand his son Aitnaios. The connection of Prometheus

34"Vermutungenzum Aetna-Festspiel des Aeschylus," Eranos 52 (1954) 61-75 =

Kleine Beitrage (above, n. 23) 249-262.
35TGrFIII p. 34,1.32.
36J. G. Droysen, Aischylos, Die Tragodien und Fragmente (Berlin 1832) 311;
T. Bergk, Griechische LiteraturgeschichteIII (Berlin 1884) 311-312; A. Koerte, Neue
Jahrbucherfir das klassische Altertum 23 [45] (1920) 201-213; F. Focke, Hermes 65
(1930) 259-304.
37See P Oxy.2257 (in TGrFIII p. 126).
70 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

with Hephaestus,a god often linked with the Kabeiroi,whose home in

Samothracewas not far from his base in Lemnos, is well known, even
apart from the mention of it at the beginning of this play. Etna is
named in the Desmotes (366 f.) as the site of the workshopof the col-
league of Prometheus,Hephaestus. Against this theory Griffith,APB
15 n. 47 objects that it involves "a performancearound 470 B.C. in
Sicily, with a rather abruptmovement away from Prometheus in the
thirdplay." "Around470" is certainlya difficultdate, and I do not wish
to minimize its difficulty. As to the other argument,one must remem-
ber that not all the original audience of the Agamemnon can have
guessed thatthe trilogy would end in Athens.
Despite the mystery that surroundsthe problem of the trilogy, we
can make out enough about the release of Prometheusand the accom-
modation with Zeus to have a general notion of the poet's theology.
With West's pronouncementthat that theology is "irreligious"and is
"no theology at all," I have no sympathy whatever. Whether or not
Aeschylus was the author,and though I think it likelier thathe was, I do
not maintainthat this is certain. It is easy to see how the theology of
the play fits in with that of the works of Aeschylus, and indeed with the
religion of the Greeksbefore the time of Plato.
According to West, speaking of the gods in the Desmotes, "the rela-
tionship of these gods to mankindis simply that of a strongertribe to a
weaker." Exactly, and that is what it continuedto be in the religion of
early Greece. West says that these gods, with the exception of Prome-
theus, have no concern for men. Certainly they have no concern for
men in general, and though Prometheus will persuade Zeus to grant
men Dike and to become the patronof strangersand of suppliants,he
will never become a champion of mankindin the sense in which Pro-
metheus is. Zeus is called, and is in a certainsense, omnipotent;but he
did not create the universe, he is not eternal, he could not kill the
immortalPrometheus,and if Prometheushad not betrayedhis secret he
would have sharedthe fate of his two predecessors. Still, men prayed
and sacrificedto Zeus and not to Prometheus;again one remembersthat
at Athens all he had in the way of honors was his torch-race. Zeus
ensures that men's crimes againsteach otherwill be punished;but since
it was easy to observe that guilty persons often escaped unpunished,
people believed that the punishmentof Zeus often fell upon the descen-
dants of the offenders, as, to take a notable example, the crime of
Gyges was visited upon his descendant Croesus. True, from an early
 Zeus, Prometheus,and GreekEthics 71

date we find occasional mention of a judgmentof the dead and the pun-
ishment of evil-doers in the next world; but this was not the general
belief.
Zeus was of course not the only god, and he and other gods also had
a special concern for certain individuals and certain communities, as
well as a special hostility towards others. A special devotion to one
god might lead to a dangerousfailure to honor another,as the case of
Hippolytus in Euripides'play named after him clearly shows us. Even
their favorites among mortals are not treated by these gods with a
Christianconsideration. Io, in the Supplices as well as in the Prome-
theus, is a case in point. Even Zeus cannot at first protect her against
the enmity of Hera; true, she is finally released, and she becomes the
ancestress of glorious descendants, but not until she has endured
unspeakabletorments. Anyone tolerably well acquaintedwith Greek
legend will remember numerous similar cases; in the Ion and the
Antiope of Euripides,a poet whose attitudeto religion is still misunder-
stood by people who have not entirely shakenoff the burdenof the tire-
some ingenuities of Verrall,the fate of the heroines is comparablewith
that of Io. The stronger tribe deals ruthlessly with the weaker; in
the OdysseyPoseidon pursues Odysseus for having blinded his son the
Cyclops, even though he has been forced to do so in order to save the
lives of his sailors and himself, with the result that he gets home only
with great difficulty,having lost all his crew, has to contend with seri-
ous troubles when he gets there, and would not have survived at all
without the active interventionof Athena, a deity whose influence with
Zeus made her even more powerful than Poseidon. Even with the help
of oracles and prophets,men cannot understandthe ways in which the
gods act upon human life; they do not live long enough, and they have
not the necessary intelligence, so that even when they have an oracle to
guide them, they will often misunderstandits words. This kind of
belief in the possibility of inscrutableaction upon humanaffairsby any
of a numberof higher powers has the advantageof keeping people in
mind of the ever-presentdanger of accidents and the need for Tyche,
for luck. Before we patronizethe gods on the score that they did not
exist, we should rememberthat they stood more or less for forces that
can be seen working in the world. This religion has the advantageof
making it easier for its believers to understandwhy this world is as it is
than it is for believers in a religion whose god is like the god of Chris-
tianity.
72 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

If one bears these facts in mind, it is easy to see why the ethics of
pre-Platonic Greece are as Williams describes them, lacking in the
notions of the will, of duty, and of obligation. Almost ever since Plato
and certainly since the beginning of the Christianera, ethical thinking
has been dominatedby the assumptionthat there is one answerto every
ethical problem, that there can be no conflict between true ends, that
there are true answersto the centralproblemsof life. But from the time
when Vico and later Herderpointed out that the values of differentcul-
tures were often incompatibleand drew attentionto the possibility of a
clash between different values that may complicate a choice between
differentactions, a differentkind of ethical thinkinghas come into exis-
tence. This need not entail relativism, but ratherentails pluralism;we
can understanddifferentvalues, and we can choose between them. Sir
Isaiah Berlin, whose whole work centers upon this importantdistinc-
tion, has written (The Crooked Timber of Humanity 208) that "the
notion that One is good, Many-diversity-is bad is ... deeply rooted
in the Platonic tradition.""EvenAristotle,"he continues, "who accepts
that humantypes differ from each other, and that thereforeelasticity in
social arrangementsis called for, accepts this as a fact, without regret,
but without any sign of approval;and with very few exceptions, this
view seems to prevail in the classical and medieval worlds, and is not
seriously questionedtill, say, the sixteenthcentury."It seems to me that
thanks to their religion the Greeks before Plato were in the fortunate
position of taking a differentview, being free from the belief that there
is only one answer to every ethical question and that the universe is so
constituted that human reason could penetrate all its secrets. Sir
Ronald Syme once remarkedto me that the most importantproblemfor
the student of antiquity is that of explaining why a small country,
mountainousand for the most infertile, should within a comparatively
short space of time have laid the foundationsof Europeanart and sci-
ence. It seems to me that a centralelement in any attemptat a solution
of that problem must be an understandingof the advantagewhich the
Greeks derivedfrom the hardrealism of theirearly religion.38

CHRISTCHURCH,OXFORD

381 am grateful to Professors Rudolf Kassel and Mary Lefkowitz for valuable assis-
tance.