Hermes is bent, he implies, and willingly receiving visitors. At least, that was my reader-response. Remember how nasty it got when that Napoleon complex got his goony dogs going to keep every farm beast in line in Animal Farm? (That's rhetorical.)
But, anyway, Agee's technique made me long to hear the original language of the text and to see it performed in a classical staging. Luckily, the Internet came through and I found a lovely and brief performance chock full of the original cadences, rhythms and music of the ancients. Nietzsche tells us that tragedy was born "out of the spirit of music," and that is certainly evident in this staging. I even closed my eyes to avoid the English subtitles. Then I returned to Agee's text and was reanimated by the performance on the page. I strongly recommend this procedure.
I mentioned that translated texts present interpretive challenges for the writer, which are often multiplied in reading by the ambiguity of common understanding. One good example will serve to highlight this issue, before moving on to the thematic chords of the work. Agee employs the term "tyranny" to describe the reign of Zeus in the time of Prometheus' demise. But another contemporary translator of the play uses the term "sovereignty" instead. I'll allow the reader to consider how the difference between these terms can affect an understanding of the overall contingencies of the play.
As Agee points out, 'tyranny' has more powerful resonances for a modern readership than 'sovereignty', and yet they are resolvable, and flow into each other, such as we know in the case of the Westphalia Treaty, for instance, which, in essence, stopped tyrants from fighting one another in Europe by granting each sovereignty for the first time over fixed borders, within which they could do pretty much what they wanted. And you might say that such order and protocols governed the otherwise truculent and selfish gods' conceits and claims.
To remind the reader, Prometheus helped Zeus overthrow the heavenly sovereignty of Kronos, and things were swell between them until Zeus, in reviewing his assets, decided he didn't really care for the mortal human race and was prepared to replace it with something more suitable. However, Prometheus favored the mortals and bestowed upon them two gifts: one, was blind hope that essentially prevented humans from seeing their ultimate pitiable fate; second, he gave the gift of fire, which, as we know, has since prehistoric times has led to considerable civilizing processes and functions, and, ultimately made our present age possible. But Zeus is not happy with this treachery and has Prometheus bound to a desolate rock forever.
Throughout Western cultural history Prometheus is regarded by humans as savior/hero figure, and as Agee reminds us he has figured prominently in key moments. Beethoven wrote scores in celebration of Napoleon, for instance, who was popularly regarded as a new Prometheus (until he became Emperor anyway). And Mary Shelley's now-dystopic-seeming novel about the consequences of playing god with new technology, Frankenstein, is, of course, sub-titled A Modern Prometheus.
It may seem we've passed the relevancy of the Prometheus theme. Some would point to Edward Snowden as Promethean figure, but I don't like the fit. However, just yesterday I was watching the film Interstellar and it prompted the Promethean theme in a surprising way. The 'hero' of Interstellar leaves behind his daughter and a nearly-depleted Earth to pilot a NASA ship through a wormhole in search of other life-bearing habitats, and, in the process, unravels the mysteries of time and gravity, and in a sense steals the quantum fire from the gods and redistributes its wealth of meaning to a needy Earth.
But the real Prometheus has not yet arrived - a godlike figure among the technological elites of the near future, who, tired of the limitations of their fellow humans, decide through eugenics and the targeting of the disposition matrix to replace the lot with ubermenschen, and this Prometheus balks, and passes the quantum bong among the hoi polloi and pays the ultimate price.
On the other hand, maybe it's not the consequences of the gifts of Prometheus we should be worried about now, but instead whether our quest for quantum singularitus, the snow leopard of cosmology, is not rather another instance of Pandora's Box.
In any case, I myself have few regrets (as Dylan sang, all those years ago, It's alright, ma, it's life and life only), but I do wish I spent far more time with the classics and long to return; I feel the ancients have all the answers we require. They are the fire that still burns in us as a species, post-mod and all the other relativistic post-thissesandthatsses be damned.
If you feel a similar hankering for the sober past, my recommendation would be to read Joel Agee's translation of Prometheus Bound, or Robert Lowell's more famous rendition, which can be found, for free, at the wonderful Archive.org. I also recommend that you put aside an hour to listen to an audio/video performance of Aeschylus's play, preferably in Greek (with subtitles, of course). After all, the father of tragedy lived back when people listened to each other intently, the oral tradition, and demonstrated incredible first works of creative non-fiction. (And remember, Nietzsche's book is actually titled The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.) You gotta hear it to believe it. Leave your academic parsing skills behind and hear the music of common Western heritage. Just Do It.
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