Ice Friday: Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”

Suffering and pain are a constant in this life, as the Greek poet Aeschylus attested almost 2,500 years ago in his masterwork Prometheus Bound.

Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside/The prison wall of pain to exhort and teach the one/Who suffers. All you have to say to me I always knew.IMG_4851

Wrong? I accept the word. I willed, willed to be wrong!/And helping humans I found to be troublesome for myself,/Yet I did not expect a punishment as this –/To be assigned an uninhabited desert peak,/Fastened in mid-air to this crag, and left to rot!IMG_5005

Listen, stop wailing for the pain I suffer now./Step on the ground; I’ll tell you what the future holds/For me: you shall know everything from first to last.IMG_4909

Do what I ask you, do it! Share the suffering/Of one whose turn is now. Grief is a wanderer/Who visits many, bringing always the same gift.

2 thoughts on “Ice Friday: Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”

  1. Beautiful excerpt! I recommend also Giacomo Leopardi, similar sensibility, two hundred years ago…

  2. You mean stuff like this…
    Bitterness and boredom is life,
    nothing else ever, and the world is mud.
    Quiet now. Despair for the last time.
    Fate gives us dying as a gift.
    (Leopardi)
    yes.

Comments are closed.