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62

O mother venerable!

O Æther! rolling round

The common light of all,

See ye what wrongs I bear?"

During all this the storm and the thunder have been increasing, till at last the earth is opened, and Prometheus, with the rock to which he is chained, sinks into the abyss.

Our first feeling is one of indignation against Zeus, but it is not altogether the right feeling. His triumph is, after all, in accordance with the great moral laws by which, according to Æschylus, the world is governed. We, with our better morality, cannot help sympathising with Prometheus more than perhaps the poet did: we love him for his love of men, and admire his courage and high spirit. But this is partly because we do not believe in Zeus. Æschylus called that high spirit arrogance; and arrogance or excess, wherever it is found, must always appear a crime to the Greek and the artist. When a good man is murdered in the midst of excessive prosperity, we must tremble, but we cannot complain; and the divine justice will assert itself in taking vengeance on his murderer. So we must feel here rather awe than indignation, and be confident in the ultimate restoration of Prometheus, and his reconciliation with the lord of heaven. Such, at least, is the Æschylean estimate of the hero's fate; and probably, if we could see it worked out in the preceding and following plays, which have unhappily been lost, we should find it not so altogether alien from our own.