Conflicts in Prometheus Bound and Antigone

Prometheus Bound, as the title implies, portrays the god Prometheus's punishment by Zeus for stealing from the gods the "treasure" of "all-fashioning fire" and giving it to mankind. Personified characters Strength and Violence, with the help of the fire god Hephaestus, shackle Prometheus, to a rock on an ocean shore. Prometheus stays in place for the entire action of the play, and is visited in turn by a chorus, comprising daughters of the sea god Oceanus, by Oceanus, by Io, a mortal priestess of the land of Argos, and by Hermes, messenger of the gods.

The hazard associated with acting out the dictates of individual conscience in the environment of a governed community is the main line of action in Prometheus Bound. But the play also dramatizes the situations of those who acquiesce in the wishes of authority, by distinguishing the opinions and comportment of those in dialogue with Prometheus. Thus Hephaestus, who functions as shackle blacksmith, is faintly irritated at the glee with which Strength and Violence drag Prometheus to the rock and slightly embarr

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f Prometheus's gift to mankind is that the gift of fire and reason and conquest of the physical universe is not an unmitigated joy. Aeschylus locates the refinement of human consciousness with the Ionian civilization, which explains Prometheus's explanation of Io's importance to human development and which is coincident with Western civilization first full flower. But of course it is well known that quite without the help of immortals, thank you, mankind, by use of both reason and fire, can manage to mess itself up repeatedly. This is amply demonstrated in Sophocles's Antigone. Though the presence of the gods is felt in the Antigone, all the characters are mortal, and the nature of the relationship between the human and the divine is moral rather than cosmic, as in Prometheus Bound. As well, the relationship between authority and individual conscience is treated differently in Antigone and Prometheus Bound. But this does not mean that there is not a definite conflict between these two aspects of human experience in the Antigone. Nor, indeed, does it mean that there is not a cosmic component to the moral argument of the play. Antigone's description of Creon's edict against burial of Polyneices sets up the conflict of the play, an
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Approximate Word count = 2252
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)