Discussing "Prometheus Bound" By Aeschylus

You don't learn until about halfway in that some of what happened before the play started is that there was a civil war between the Titans led by Cronus, Cronus's ruling Olympus or wherever the gods are, and zeus and his party they decide that zeus wants to zeus should be in charge of olympus instead and prometheus is sort of caught in the middle and he doesn't he wants to be on the winning side and his mother told him that stratagem is how you win wars and so he goes to the titans and he says look i have these strategies and i'll help you win and the titans say that they want to win just by brute force they don't want to use strategy And so Prometheus instead goes to Zeus's side and offers them to them and they accept.

And he's somehow able to get Cronus and the Titans imprisoned in Tartaros, which is this deep pit.

It's a black abyss under the earth somewhere.

And so Zeus wins this civil war and he decides afterwards that what he wants to do is destroy humanity.

It's not up to snuff and he wants to start over and create something new and Prometheus doesn't want him to do that.

And so he gives fire to mankind And the play doesn't describe exactly why, but for some reason this makes it so Zeus can't destroy humanity.

And what Zeus does instead is he punishes Prometheus by ordering that he be chained to a rock until further notice.

And that's where the play begins.

There's a small group of gods.

Hephaestus, who's the god of blacksmithing, metalworking, lava, or volcanoes, rather.

And I think fire is one of the things he's god of.

And then there are these two other figures who I guess are gods, and they're just described in the translation that I read as power and violence.

And they chain him to the rock.

And the rest of the play, it's called Prometheus Bound.

Prometheus is chained up the whole time.

It's just these conversations that he has with various gods who show up and first or gods or mythical figures the the chorus are the daughters of ocean and they come up first and he talks to them for a while and then ocean appears and he talks to him and then a figure named io or eo and finally hermes and the action is pretty straightforward the conversations are pretty complicated so there's not much more to talk about in terms of what happens but we can get into the substance of the dialogue i don't know does that kind of cover

Yes, that's a very good summary.

And I think if it's all right with you, I have some sort of contextual things I want to go

over

before getting into.