CHORUS
Did you perhaps go further than you told us?
PROMETHEUS
I gave men power to stop foreseeing their death.
CHORUS
What cure did you prescribe for this disease?
PROMETHEUS
I sowed blind hopes to live as their companions.





I read several translations of this play and watched several performances. Bia( Force and Violence), who stands by quietly, is a character I find fascinating. The translator Joel Agee explains her role in the play in the introduction of the book.

“Bia…does not speak….Bia, as an embodiment of brute force, needs no words. Hephaistos’s hammer expresses her meaning eloquently enough.”

Is it that brute force needs no words because the power is simply self evident? A representation of violence could illicit fear, a feeling of menace, and would prove hard to quantify. And therefore it makes sense that Bia stands quietly to the side while on stage.





I started reading Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound while reading American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
“When it went off…that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel…his vain hope, that dynamite would put an end to wars. We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man's new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it.”
-Robert Oppenheimer