This research examines the issue of individual conscience versus corporate authority as articulated in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and Sophocles's Antigone. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas in each work that appear relevant to the conflict between conscience and authority and then to discuss the means by which the plays achieve sentient and intellectual impact on account of their theme.
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 embarrassed at being obliged to secure his friend to it. The Chorus arrive to comfort Prometheus but are stricken with terror at his plight and in awe of "the new laws indeed / By which Zeus tyrannically rules" (PB 25). The Chorus, uniform in their pity for Prometheus, are not about to challenge Zeus's newly administration of Olympus--new because it appears that Prometheus is being punished at roughly the same time as Zeus's deposition and killing of his titan father...