Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/408

338 secret was the token that the all-defying rebel was transformed into the willing subject and minister of Zeus.

It is related that Zeus, when be released Prometheus from his chains, required him, as a slight voluntary punishment, to bind his head with branches of the agnus-castus, a plant frequently employed for religious purposes.

The same symbolic signification was, in after times, attached to the ring of Prometheus, referred to by Catullus and Pliny. The former relates that when Prometheus appeared at the marriage festival of Peleus and Thetis, he wore a ring, as a slight token of his ancient punishment:

Not as an ornament, says Pliny (xxxiii. 4), has Prometheus worn the iron ring, but as a chain; and (xxxvii. 1), as a slight token of punishment, a piece of the rock to which he had been fastened was inserted in the ring instead of a gem.

The iron finger-ring is not, like the lugos-crown, expressly referred back to Æschylus; the same signification, however, attaches to both, and it is not probable,