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Zeus in Aeschylus1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
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Extract

After a hundred and thirty years of controversy, the interpretation of the Prometheus Bound is still the subject of debate. To the romantic poets of the revolutionary era, the Titan tortured by Zeus for his services to mankind appeared as a symbol of the human spirit in its struggle to throw off the chains which priests and kings had forged for it. But to the distinguished Hellenists who after the fall of Napoleon laid the foundations of the great century of German scholarship, no such naïve and one-sided view of the Prometheus seemed tolerable. It was partly, perhaps, that the political atmosphere discouraged an interpretation adverse to authority; but the other writings of Aeschylus himself seemed to offer strong evidence against this view. Elsewhere in Aeschylus, they could argue, Zeus was treated with profound respect. In the Supplices, he is continually appealed to by the chorus of Danaids, who miss no opportunity to extol the supremacy of his power. Zeus' omnipotence is the burden of a celebrated section of the first chorus of the Agamemnon; although scholars have differed widely in the details of their interpretation of this passage, most are agreed that it expresses theological doctrines that are at once subtle and sublime, and many have discovered profound significance in its puzzling allusions to ‘learning by suffering’ and to a χάρις that comes to men from the gods. Chiefly upon evidence derived from these two plays, many scholars have credited their author with the invention of a peculiar personal religion, tending to exalt Zeus at the expense of the other members of the Olympic pantheon, and crediting him with the purpose of perfecting men in goodness through the discipline of suffering. Some have gone so far as to detect tendencies to monotheism in Aeschylus. A fair specimen of the usual kind of view is that of Nilsson, who begins by hesitating to pronounce Aeschylus a monotheist; Aeschylus, he warns us, is not a religious innovator preaching a new form of religion, but a profoundly pious poet; but later, he comes dangerously near to this view. The power of Zeus, he argues, is so much magnified that at one point he seems more a principle than a personal god.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 76 , November 1956 , pp. 55 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1956

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References

2 See Heinemann, K., Die Tragischen Gestalten der Griechen in der Weltliteratur, pp. 12 f.Google Scholar; O. Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol von Shaftesbury zu Goethe; Séchan, L., Le Mythe de Prométhee, pp. 15 f., 95 f.Google Scholar

3 First Haas, in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, iii (1900), pp. 163 f.Google Scholar; see the list of writers taking this view given by Nestle, Wm., Griechische Studien, p. 66Google Scholar, n. 14. So also Rose, H. J., A Handbook of Greek Literature, p. 159Google Scholar: ‘Practically, Aeschylus was a monotheist.’

4 Griechische Religionsgeschichte I, pp. 707 f. The list of books and articles whose authors hold this kind of view about religion in Aeschylus could be made very long indeed. See, for example, Schmid-Stählin, , Griechische Literaturgeschichte I ii, pp. 265 f.Google Scholar; Wilamowitz, , Der Glaube der Hellenen II, pp. 133 fGoogle Scholar; Pohlenz, M., Die Griechische Tragoedie 2 I, pp. 141 f.Google Scholar; Nestle, Wm., Neues Jahrbuch, 1907, pp. 225–46, 305–33Google Scholar = Griechische Studien, pp. 61 f.; G. Murray, Aeschylus. The Creator of Tragedy; Jaeger, W., Paideia I, pp. 263–4Google Scholar (English version); Guthrie, W. K. C., The Greeks and their Gods, pp. 65, 258Google Scholar; Cornford, F. M., Plato's Cosmology, pp. 361 f.Google Scholar

5 P. 708, top: ‘er ist kein Systembauer, sondern ein von einem hohen Glauben an seine Religion ergriffener Dichter’.

6 P. 711, near top: ‘seine Macht wird so gesteigert, dass er an einer Stelle mehr als ein Prinzip denn als ein persönlicher Gott erscheint’. The ‘one place’ is, of course, Ag. 160f., on which see below.

7 Other evidence for pantheism in Aeschylus is lacking: and without a knowledge of the context of this fragment it is unsafe to argue from it. In default of any evidence to support the pantheistic interpretation, I suspect that it means much the same as the concluding line of the Trachiniae:

8 P. 711: ‘auf die Religion der Nachwelt hat seine Zeusreligion kaum Einfluss gehabt’.

9 Die Aeschyleische Trilogie Prometheus, 1824, pp. 7 f.

10 Prolegomena zu Aeschylus' Tragoedien, 1869, pp. 207 f.

11 Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 1938, pp. 9–10.

12 See especially Wackernagel, J., Verhandlungen der 46. Versammlung der Philologen, 1902, pp. 65 f.Google Scholar, Studien zum Griechischen Perfektum, pp. 11 f.; Denniston, J. D., The Greek Particles, pp. lxvii f.Google Scholar; see bibliography in Schmid, W., Untersuchungen über den Gefesselten Prometheus, pp. 1–4Google Scholar and cf. pp. 41 ff. of that work.

13 See York, E. C.CQ 30 (1936), pp. 116 f.Google Scholar, pp. 153 f.; J. D. Denniston, ib., pp. 73 f., 192 f.; Kranz, W., Stasimon 226–8.Google Scholar

14 Wackernagel seems to have arrived at this opinion for purely linguistic reasons: see n. 12 above.

15 Opuscula iii 81 f., 95 f., 120 f.; see also the introduction to his edition of the play.

16 In the introduction of his edition of the play (2nd. edn., 1878; English translation by F. D. Allen, Boston, 1891).

17 See Thomson, J. A. K. in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 37, 1920.Google Scholar

18 It has been revived in an extreme form by Vandvik, E. (Norske Videnskaps Akadimi, Hist.-Filos. Klasse, 1942, 2)Google Scholar; the experiment does not seem to me successful.

19 Ap. Welcker, op. cit., pp. 40 f.

20 Aischylos, Interpretationen (1914), pp. 149–50; Der Glaube der Hellenen, II 133–4.

21 Revue de Philologie 22, 1948, pp. 156 f. Cf Myers, E. in Hellenica (ed. Abbott, E.), 1880, p. 20Google Scholar; Campbell, L., edn. of Prometheus Vinctus, 1890Google Scholar, introd.; Case, Janet, CR 1904, pp. 99 ff.Google Scholar; Weil, H., Etudes sur le Drame antique, pp. 82 f.Google Scholar; Butcher, S. H., Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, pp. 17 ff.Google Scholar; Wm. Nestle, loc. cit.; Sheppard, J. T., Greek Tragedy, pp. 62 f.Google Scholar; Mazon, P., Eschyle I, pp. 153 f.Google Scholar; Croiset, M., Eschyle, p. 163Google Scholar; J. A. K. Thomson, loc. cit.. p. 34; Todd, O. J., CQ 1925, pp. 61 ff.Google Scholar; Pohlenz, M., Die Griechische Tragoedie I 2, pp. 76 ff.Google Scholar; Thomson, G. edn. of Prometheus Bound, pp. 12 f.Google Scholar; Bonnard, A., Rev. de Theol. et de Phil., 1933, pp. 206 f.Google Scholar, Vian, F., Rev. des Et. Gr., 1942, pp. 190 f.Google Scholar; Solmsen, F., Hesiod and Aeschylus, pp. 147 f.Google Scholar; Kitto, H. D. F., JHS 1934, pp. 14 f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; id.Greek Tragedy, p. 64, n. 1; Séchan, L., Le Mythe de Prometheé, pp. 55 f.Google Scholar

22 Aischylos als Regisseur und Theologe (Basel, 1951), pp. 68 f. Reinhardt makes the important remark that the stress laid upon the youth of Zeus in the P.V. may well be explained by the desire to contrast the older gods, to whom Prometheus be longed, with the younger generation of Zeus and his brothers and sisters. For a similar contrast, cf. Eum. 150, 731, 778–9, 808–9, 882–3.

23 See Wilamowitz, , Der Glaube der Hellenen I, pp. 127–32.Google Scholar

24 Professor Dodds supports his argument by a reference to Moschion ff. 6 (Nauck2, pp. 813–14). This fragment describes the early time when men lived like beasts without houses, crops, or tools:

At last Time, the mother and nurse of all things, educated them:

and they tilled the soil, built cities, and buried their dead. Professor Dodds suggests that Moschion wrote with the Prometheus-trilogy in mind; he thinks the first of the two passages I have quoted may allude to the replacement, at the end of the trilogy, of Bia by Dike as the πάρεδρος of Zeus. Now in line 16 it is not certain that Διί is the right reading; both the MSS. of Stobaeus originally read υηὶ, which has been corrected to Διὶ in P. The correction may be right, but Canter's δίκη has slightly more palaeographical probability. But even if Διί were unquestionably right, the inference regarding the Prometheus-trilogy would not be certain.

25 Op. cit. With ludicrous over-confidence, he treats this conjecture of his own, in his history of Greek literature, as an established fact: Schmid-Stählin, op. cit., I ii 193, 281 f.

26 ProfessorRobertson, D. S. has suggested (CR 1953, pp. 79–80)Google Scholar that the person whose mischievous behaviour is described in the concluding lines is Ares, and that Dike is leading up to an account of his trial for the murder of Halirrhothius. Ares, however, is nowhere else credited with such a persecution of travellers as that described in lines 34 f.; and one recalls that this feature would suit Cycnus, not the son of Poseidon killed by Achilles, but the son of Ares killed by Heracles. This Cycnus used to harry pilgrims on the way to Delphi (Hes. Sc. 478–80, Eur. HF. 389–94).

Wecklein and Nauck credit Aeschylus with a play Κύκνος, but only tentatively, because of Ar. Ran. 963:

Professor Robertson has warned me that in this passage the association with Memnon suggests that the other Cycnus is meant (cf. Pindar, Ol. ii, 82Google Scholar and Isth. v, 39). Still, the Hesiodic Cycnus is a familiar figure in literature and art (cf. Hes. Sc. passim; Pind. Ol. x, 15; Eur. H.F., loc. cit.; Alc. 503; see Engelmann in Roscher's lexicon, p. 1690; he occurs ten times in Dr. Jacobsthal's mythological index to Sir John Beazley's Attic Red-Figure Vasepainters, the other Cycnus never). But it is hard to think of a supplement that will accord with this suggestion. For another suggestion about this fragment, see Fraenkel, Ed. in Eranos lii, 1954, 61 f.Google Scholar

27 This passage helps to make clearer what should be clear from Eur. H.F. 1169 and id. fr. 825, that there is no reason for altering at Ag. 1529 to ἔρξεν.

28 Ap. Arist. Eth. Nic. 1132 b 27; cf. Seneca, Apocol. 14, 2.

29 See Fraenkel, ad loc. (Agamemnon II, p. 100).Google Scholar

30 ‘Mr. Conington observes with truth that βιαίως means “violently” rather than “powerfully”; and on the strength of this he prefers βίαιος, and translates “strange as it may seem (που), the free gift of the gods is forced on men”. But we may fairly reply that the poet merely meant βιαίως ἀρχόντων, “ruling by the law of constraint, and not allowing mortals to follow their own headstrong wills with impunity”’ (Paley, ad loc.).

31 Headlam, W. (Agamemnon, p. 187Google Scholar, followed by Cornford, F. M., Plato's Cosmology, p. 361Google Scholar) suggests that ποῦ might be written instead of που, and the sentence taken as a question; he would then translate, ‘Where is there any joy of deities who sit upon their awful seat violently?’ He may be right in taking the sentence as a question, but his translation scarcely suits the sense. If the sentence were a question, it would be better rendered, ‘And where is the favour shown by the gods who sit on their dread bench through violence?’ A close parallel is found in the desperate appeal of Croesus on the funeral pyre (Bacchyl. 3, 37–8): where χάρις means ‘grace’, ‘favour’, ‘gratitude’. In this context, the Chorus may well ask where is the χἁρις of the gods; the implication would, of course, be that it is hard to see any. Cf. P. Oxy. 2251, 4–5 (fr. 280 in my appendix to the Loeb edition).

32 Mette, H. J., Supplementum Aeschyleum, fr. 116, l. 14–15Google Scholar; Page, D. L., Greek Literary Papyri I, p. 8Google Scholar. Loeb, , Aeschylus fr. 277.Google Scholar

33 I am grateful to Mr. D. A. Rees for urging upon me the usefulness of this argument from Plato.

34 All mentions of each god and daimon in Aeschylus are conveniently listed by Kausche, W., Mythologumena Aeschylea (Diss Philol. Halenses, IX (1888), pp. 129 f.Google Scholar See Chapter II of Kranz', W.Stasimon (pp. 34 f.)Google Scholar, entitled ‘Die göttliche und die menschliche Welt in der alten Tragoedie’.

35 Mouths, , P.V. 1032, ff. 350Google Scholar, 5; feet, Eum. 294; arms or hands, Supp. 313, 1066, P.V. 849, Cho. 395, ff. 327; eyes, Supp. 812–13, P.V. 654, 903.

36 Transport, P.V. 287–8, 394–6, Eum. 403–5. Weapons, , P.V. 405, 924–5Google Scholar, Sept. 131; Apollo and Artemis must have used arrows in the Niobe. Zeus' thunder is mentioned at Sept. 255, 429–30, 444–6, 513, 629–30, P.V. 358 ff., 667–8, 915 f., 1016, 1043–4, 1061–2, 1082–3, Eum. 826–8, fr. 196 in Mette's Nachtrag zum Supplementum Aeschyleum.

37 Apollo pursues Cassandra in the Agamemnon; Poseidon pursues Amymone in the Amymone: Boreas doubtless pursued Oreithyia in the Oreithyia. Zeus pursues Io in the Supplices and P.V., Europe in the Kares, Semele in the Semele-trilogy, Danae in the Perseus-trilogy, and no doubt Callisto in the Callisto.

38 I do not trouble to show how feeble is the evidence adduced by those who have tried to prove him acquainted with the works of these writers. Nestle's, Wm. remarks, in the article already quoted (Griechische Studien pp. 122–3)Google Scholar, provides a fair specimen. Neither shall I deal with the attempts which some have made, encouraged by a light-hearted remark of Cicero, (‘Aeschylus, non solum poeta sed etiam Pythagoreus …’, Tusc. ii. 10, 23)Google Scholar, to prove Aeschylus a Pythagorean or an Orphic. On the Lycurgus trilogy and its connection with Orpheus, see the sensible remarks of Linforth, I. M. (The Arts of Orpheus, p. 10).Google Scholar

39 See Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and The Irrational, p. 35Google Scholar, with note. Ar. Rhet. 1391 B says that εὐτυχία makes men φιλόθεοι. But the context indicates that this means little more than that they are disposed to accept the decisions of the rulers of the universe in an uncomplaining spirit. ‘Of the major Olympians’, Dodds writes, ‘perhaps only Athena inspired an emotion that could reasonably be described as love.’ It is probable that in other cities beside Athens the local tutelary god inspired a similar feeling (Hera at Argos, Apollo at Delphi and Delos, etc.).

40 Much misunderstanding has been caused by ll. 342–3:

Denniston (G.P., p. 303) correctly explains the last phrase as meaning ‘if you want to labour’; no doubt of the sincerity of Oceanus' offer is implied.

41 If there was a god to whom the Greeks assigned a not dissimilar relation of partiality, protection, and patronage towards the whole of humanity, it was Prometheus. And they did not conceive of Prometheus as having any share in the government of the universe. This is the prerogative of Zeus,

42 Since Aeschylus everywhere works against the background of the system of moral order I have tried to describe, and therefore in a sense may be said to ‘teach’ that it is true, this statement may be thought to go too far. But the ‘teaching’ which poets are said by the Aeschylus, Aristophanic (Ran. 1054–5)Google Scholar to provide was probably held to consist chiefly in the depiction of ‘viva constantiae, fortitudinis, animi magnitudinis exempla’ (cf. ib. 1019–22) and not in the propagation of new religious or philosophical doctrines.