"Power newly won is always harsh"

Your kindness to the human race has earned you this.
A god who would not bow to the gods' anger--you,
Transgressing right, gave privileges to mortal men.
For that you shall keep watch upon this bitter rock,
Standing upright, unsleeping, never bowed in rest.
And many groans and cries of pain shall come from you,
All useless; for the heart of Zeus is hard to appease.
Power newly won is always harsh.

Those words are spoken by the metal working god Hephaestus at the beginning of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, the first and only surviving work of a tragic trilogy.

The Titan who gave humans the gift of fire and many others was brought to a remote spot in the land of the Scythians by Strength and Violence, the unquestioning agents of the new Olympian order. The lame Hephaestus regrets his task of fastening the bonds but is afraid to violate the orders of the new ruler of the cosmos.

In Greek mythology, the early days of the universe were scenes of violent struggle. Zeus has come to power in a bloody revolution against the old order and, like many in such situations, he is all too ready to use violence to crush any challenges to his rule.

Prometheus, whose name means foresight, saw it coming:

...I know exactly every thing
That is to be; no torment will come unforeseen.
My appointed fate I must endure as best I can,
Knowing the power of Necessity is irresistible.
...For bestowing gifts upon mankind
I am harnessed in this torturing clamp. For I am he
Who hunted out the source of fire, and stole it, packed
In pith of a dry fennel-stalk. And fire has proved
For men a teacher in every art, their grand resource....

Fire was not his only benefit:

...What I did
For mortals in their misery, hear now. At first
Mindless, I gave them mind and reason. --What I say
Is not in censure of mankind, but showing you
How all my gifts to them were guided by goodwill.--
In those days they had eyes, but sight was meaningless;
Heard sounds, but could not listen; all their length of life
They passed like shapes in dreams, confused and purposeless.

He taught humans to use tools and build houses and ships, measure the seasons, do arithmetic, domesticate animals, use medicinal herbs, interpret prophecies and dreams, use minerals and more. Zeus, on the other hand, was scornful of humans and may have wished to see them wiped out and replaced by a new model.

In his agony, Prometheus is visited by the Titan Oceanus and his daughters, who form a sympathetic chorus. He has a hostile interview with Hermes, messenger of Zeus. And he meets with Io, the unfortunate woman courted by Zeus who was turned into a cow by the jealous Hera and tormented by a gadfly.

Prometheus reluctantly relates to Io the course of her future wanderings and suffering, but, like him, she is destined to eventually be released from punishment. And one of her descendants, the future Heracles, is destined to free him from bondage.

It may sound like this is a story with a simple good guy (Prometheus) and a bad guy (Zeus), but the tragic spirit is too deep for that . Aeschylus is going after something else. About which more tomorrow.

ON THE BRIGHT (GREEN) SIDE, here's a nice item from CNN about how the Veteran's Conservation Corps is helping returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan with green jobs and a healing environment.

THE FUNCTIONS OF POVERTY. In case you missed yesterday's link to a great Washington Post story on how expensive it is to be poor, here it is again. That article reminded me of this classic essay in sociology by Herbert Gans titled The Uses of Poverty: the Poor Pay All.

DIRTY POOL. Here's a look at how employers have intensified their fight against union organizing in recent years.

IT'S WHAT WE DON'T KNOW that really bugs us.

EXTREME MAMMAL UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Forethought

Hesiod and the Muse but Gustave Moreau. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Welcome to an ongoing series about Greek tragedy, along with links and comments about current events. The topic at hand is the myth of Prometheus, which is the subject of Aeschylus' play Prometheus Bound. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

The earliest source on the myth of Prometheus is probably from the Greek poet Hesiod, who probably lived in the 8th century BC. He left two major works, Theogony and Works and Days. The former is one version of how the universe and gods came into being. The latter has some of that, along with advice on farming. Prometheus appears in both.

Hesiod's vision of the origin of things is anything but serene and orderly a la Genesis. The universe began with a void or chaos and many struggles, wars and reversals led to the triumph of the Olympian gods under the leadership of Zeus.

Prometheus, whose name means forethought was a Titan, a member of an earlier generation of immortals. He could foresee the outcome of the struggle between the older generation of Titans and that of the gods and sided with Zeus in the struggle.

His foresight wasn't much help in keeping him out of trouble. He initially enraged Zeus by a trick over a sacrificial meal. A dispute arose as to who got which part of a sacrificial ox. Prometheus tricked Zeus by disguising the best portions and allowing Zeus to choose. Zeus picked the part that just contained fat and some bones, while the humans got the good parts.

Zeus retaliated by withholding from men the secret of fire (and by creating the mischievous race of women to plague mankind, but that's a different story). You probably know the rest of the story. Prometheus stole the divine fire and gave it to humans. Then, according to the Theogony,

Cunning Prometheus he [Zeus] bound with unbreakable and painful chains and drove a stake through his middle. And he turned on him a long-winged eagle, which ate his immortal liver; by night the liver grew as much again as the long-winged bird had eaten in the whole day...

Thus it is not possible to deceive the mind of Zeus or escape his judgment. Even the trickster Prometheus, Iapetus' son, was not able to escape the heavy consequences of his anger. In spite of all his cleverness he lies helplessly bound by a great chain.

The punishment wasn't destined to last forever, but we'll see tomorrow that it lasted long enough.

IT'S ABOUT TIME. The new federal budget will expand protections for workers.

THE FAT FOOD INDUSTRY (AND A RECIPE) here.

CLIMATE CHANGE. From Coal Tattoo, here's a look at the prospects of climate change legislation.

SENDING MESSAGES. Here's an interesting article on evolution and consumption.

ANNALS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. Here's an item about path finding sociological research that involved walking around with untied shoelaces (for real).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The first rebel

Ouch! That had to hurt. A 17th century painting of Prometheus by Jacob Jordaens, courtesy of wikipedia.

Welcome to Goat Rope's latest series on Everything You Always Wanted to Know (or not) about Greek Tragedy. If you want to skip this part, you can scroll down for links and comments about current events. If, on the other hand, you are a budding or a seasoned classics dork, please click on earlier posts.

Aeschylus was the earliest tragedian whose works survive. Out of dozens and dozens of his plays, only seven survive, which is a real tragedy. Included among his surviving works is the only intact trilogy, the Orestes cycle, which includes the Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and the Eumenides.

I'm going to start a survey of his work with Prometheus Bound, the first and unfortunately only remaining work of a trilogy on the Titan who rebelled against Zeus to help humanity and paid a terrible price.

This is a deep myth, one that predates Aeschylus by centuries and has continued to inspire art and thought for thousands of years afterward. But it was Aeschylus' version that made the biggest impression.

Later generations of religious and political radicals would seize on the Titan who stole the fire of the gods and gave it to helpless humans as the founder of their line.

The English poet Percy Shelley, the archetypal romantic rebel, wrote a revolutionary play in 1820 called Prometheus Unbound. His widow Mary Shelley would subtitle her novel Frankenstein as The Modern Prometheus (although the analogy doesn't quite seem to work).

Another rebel, the young Karl Marx, in his doctoral dissertation on The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature called Prometheus "the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar."

Herman Melville in Moby-Dick compared Captain Ahab to Prometheus:

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

And, while we're at it, the rebellious composer Franz Liszt composed a work in his honor.

All of which is to say, this story has legs. More to come...

CHEW ON THIS. From Democracy Now, here's an interview with Michael Pollan on the politics of food.

CAP AND TRADE. Here's Paul Krugman on current climate change proposals.

UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT. West Virginia's recently privatized workers compensation system is messing with people again. This looks like it could be a nice little fight.

THE UNION PREMIUM. Yet another study shows that unionized workers get a better deal.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FRANKENSTEIN: LIVING THEMES, UNSOLVED PROBLEMS

This public domain image comes courtesy of www.moviewallpapers.net.

El Cabrero hopes you have enjoyed Frankenstein Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries, which discuss current events in addition to Mary Shelley's novel.

To wrap it up,this story is a gold mine of themes and inter-related stories which literary scholars refer to as “intertextuality.” Here are some examples:

*The story echoes the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, a key influence on the French Revolution and the later Romantic movement. For Rousseau, people are good by nature but are corrupted by society.

*The subtitle of the book is “The Modern Prometheus,” referring to the myth which was the subject of an ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus and a verse drama by Percy Shelley himself. In the myth, the titan Prometheus fashions humanity and gives it the gift of fire. In the book, Victor dreams that "A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me." It didn't quite work out that way. Victor had plenty of troubles and Prometheus was chained to a rock by Zeus. An eagle or vulture would tear out his liver each day. At night, the wounds would heal only to be reopened.

*The creature is also compared to Adam in the Biblical narrative and resembles Satan from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is one of the books the creature read. (See yesterday's discussion of a monster's reading list.) Like Milton's Satan, he reached a point where he said, in effect,

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost.
Evil, be thou my good.

Here are a few of the lasting human themes of this story I came up with:

*The tragic tendency of people to overreach their proper limits, cross forbidden boundaries, and bring about their own destruction (a common theme in myths, literature, history, and... uhhh...politics);

*The dangers of scientific and technological research unchecked by ethical considerations;

*The danger of bringing a being into the world without caring for it;

*The unintended consequences of human action;

*The relationship between emotion and intellect and the dangers of the unchecked will to knowledge (another mythic theme);

*Today, the book reminds me of the increasingly blurry line between the living and the non-living.

Official Goat Rope verdict: Mary did pretty good.

EFCA GOES TO THE SENATE. The Employee Free Choice Act, which passed the U.S. House in March 241-185, is moving to the Senate, where it may come up for a vote as soon as June 20--WV Day. EFCA would effectively restore the right of US workers to form unions by recognizing representation when a majority of workers sign cards indicated their willingness to join. It would also increase penalties on companies that harass, intimidate, or retaliate against workers who try to organize. Among WV's delegation, only Shelley Moore Capito opposed it.

JR. JET SET. According to The Week Magazine,

Wealthy New York City parents are hiring private jets to take their children to summer camp, says The New York Post. Charter company Revolution Air has set aside more than 20 jets for the service, which charges $8,000 per child and offers a special menu of ice cream, chicken fingers, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches...

THE PENTAGON'S latest assessment of President Bush's Iraq strategy paints a grim picture that tells us what we already knew: the "surge" isn't helping matters.

NEW NOTES. For the Rev. Jim Lewis' latest "Notes from under the Fig Tree," click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED