Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/244

220 rather than days, is taken up with long narratives of Prometheus to the Oceanides, with the fruitless intercession of Oceanus himself, and the strange entry of another victim of Zeus, the half-mad Moon-maiden Io, driven by the gadfly, and haunted by the ghost of the hundred-eyed Argos. The chorus of the Prometheus is perhaps in character and dramatic fitness the most beautiful and satisfying known to us on the Greek stage. The songs give an expression of Weltschmerz for which it would be hard to find a parallel before the present century. The whole earth is in travail as Prometheus suffers: "There is a cry in the waves of the sea as they fall together, and groaning in the deep; a wail comes up from the cavern realms of Death, and the springs of the holy rivers sob with the anguish of pity." In another place the note is more personal: "Nay, thine was a hopeless sacrifice, O beloved; speak—what help shall there be, and where? What succour from things of a day? Didst thou not see the little-doing, strengthless, dream-like, wherein the blind race of man is fettered? Never, never shall mortal counsels outpass the great Harmony of Zeus!" Zeus is irresistible: those who obey him have peace and happiness such as the Ocean-Daughters once had themselves. Yet they feel that it is better to rebel.

There is perhaps no piece of lost literature that has been more ardently longed for than the Prometheus Freed.* What reconciliation was possible? One can see that Zeus is ultimately justified in many things. For instance, the apparently aimless persecution of Io leads to great results, among them the birth of Heracles, who is another saviour of mankind and the actual deliverer of Prometheus. Again, it seems that Prometheus does not intend to overthrow the 'New Tyrant,' as Shelley's