Prometheus Bound

Prometheus Bound raises serious questions about the relationship between power and justice. In particular, the play explores Zeus’s power to show that power and justice often are not aligned. Zeus’s rule is consistently defined as tyranny throughout the play. Already in ancient Greece the concept of tyranny possessed negative associations: A tyrant was an autocratic ruler who often resorted to cruelty to achieve their aims. Significantly, Zeus’s power is personified from the beginning by the figures of Might and Violence: These are going to become the qualities that Zeus’s tyranny embodies throughout the play. At the same time, Zeus and his rule are distanced from justice and right. This is notable in the play’s mythical and religious context, because Justice—as a personification—was regularly associated with Zeus’s sovereignty in other examples of early Greek literature, including Hesiod’s epics (the Theogony and Works and Days) as well as other plays by Aeschylus (such as Suppliant Women and Agamemnon). In Prometheus Bound, on the other hand, justice—or Justice—is completely absent from Zeus’s exercise of power. Far from being just, Zeus’s rule employs “customs that have no justice to them” (150), while “his justice [is] / a thing he keeps by his own standard” (186-87).