“Explain that.”
I looked directly into her eyes. I had expected sharp blue ones, but they were mild golden-brown and went well with the straw-coloured hair. I said, “You asked for my help to become a better poet. I need yours to finish my last and greatest work. I lack the knowledge to complete it myself.”
She whispered, “What work?”
“Prometheus Unbound.”
I hoped this conversation would be the first of a series lasting the rest of my life. Her curt, impetuous words, together with a haunted look, as if she must shortly run away, had led me to speak of Prometheus at least a year before I intended, but it was now too late to speak of less important things. I asked her to be patient if I told her a story she perhaps knew already. She glanced at her wristwatch then nodded.
The early Greeks (I said) believed the earth was a woman who, heated by his lightningstrokes, fertilized by his rain, undulated beneath her first offspring, the sky. She gave birth to herbs, trees, beasts and titans. The titans can be named but never clearly defined. There is Atlas the maker of space, and Cronos whom Aristotle identifies with time. There is also Prometheus, whose name means foresight and torch. He was a craftsman, and moulded men from the dust of his mother’s body. The multiplying children of earth could not leave her. She tired of her husband’s lust, needing room for her family, room to think. She persuaded Cronos to castrate his dad with a stone sickle. The sky recoiled from her and time became master of the universe. When people came to live in cities they looked back on the reign of Cronos as a golden age, for in those days we were mainly shepherds and food-gatherers and shared the goods of the earth equally, without much warfare. But we had cyclops too, great men who worked in metal. Cronos feared those and locked them in hell, a place as far below the earth as the sky is above her. And when Cronos mated with his sister Rhea he became a cruel husband. He knew how dangerous a man’s children can be and swallowed his own as soon as they were born. The earth disliked that. She advised Rhea to give her man a stone when the next child came. Time, who has no organs of taste, swallowed this stone thinking it was yet another son. The boy’s mother called him Zeus and had him privately educated. When he was old enough to fight his father for the government of the universe he tricked the old man into drinking emetic wine and vomiting up the other children he had swallowed. These were the gods, and Zeus became their leader. The gods were more cunning than the titans, but less strong, and only Prometheus saw that cunning would replace strength as master of the universe. He tried to reconcile the two sides. When this proved impossible he joined the rebels.
The war which followed lasted ten years. Prometheus advised Zeus to release the cyclops from hell and when this was done they equipped the gods with helmet, trident and thunderbolt. Zeus won, of course, being supported by his brothers, by the earthmother, by the cyclops, by Prometheus and by men. What followed? The new boss of the universe confirmed his power by threatening mankind with death. Prometheus saved us by giving us hope (which allows us to despise death) and fire (which the gods wanted to keep to themselves). So Zeus punished Prometheus by crucifying him on a granite cliff. But Prometheus is Immortal. He writhes there to the present day.
“Madam,” I asked my woman, “do these matters seem savage and remote from you? This oppressed mother always plotting with a son or daughter against a husband or father, yet breeding nothing but a new generation of oppressors? This new administration crushing a clumsy old one with the help of the skilled workers, common people and a radical intellectual, and then taking control with the old threats of prison and bloody punishment.”
She nodded seriously and said, “It is savage, but not remote.”
I said, “Exactly. Our political theatres keep changing but the management always presents the tragedy of Prometheus or foresight abused. The ancient titans are the natural elements which shape and govern us when we live in small tribes. Foresight helps us build cities which give protection from the revolving seasons and erratic crops. Unluckily these states are also formed through warfare. They are managed by winners who enrich themselves at the expense of the rest and pretend their advantages are as natural as the seasons, their mismanagement as inevitable as bad weather. In these states the fate of Prometheus warns clear-sighted people not to help the commoners against their bosses. But wherever we notice that poverty is not natural, but created by some of us unfairly distributing what the rest have made, democracy is conceived. The iron wedges nailing Prometheus to his rock begin to loosen. This is why the poem which presents Prometheus as a hero was written for the world’s first and greatest democratic state. I mean Athens, of course.”
“Ancient Athens,” said my woman firmly, “oppressed women, kept slaves, and fought unjust wars for gain.”
“Yes!” I cried. “And in that it was like every other state in the history of mankind. But what made Athens different was the unusual freedom enjoyed by most men in it. When these men compared themselves with the inhabiters of the great surrounding empires (military Persia, priestridden Egypt, Carthage with its huge navy and stock-exchange) they were astonished by their freedom.”
She said, “Define freedom.”
I said, “It is the experience of active people who live by work they do best, are at ease with their neighbours, and responsible for their government.” She said, “You have just admitted that your free, active Athenians oppressed their neighbours and more than half their own people.”
I said, “Yes, and to that extent they were not free, and knew it. Their popular drama, the first plays which the common memory of mankind has seen fit to preserve, shows that warfare and slavery — especially sexual slavery — are horrible things, and at last destroy the winners and the empires who use them.”
“Which means,” cried my woman, looking more like a tragic heroine with every utterance, “that the Athenians were like our educated bourgeois of Western Europe and North America, who draw unearned income from the poor of their own and other countries, yet feel superior to the equivalent class in Russia, because we applaud writers who tell us we are corrupt.” After a silence I said, “Correct, madam. But do not be offended if I draw a little comfort from just one Athenian achievement: the tragic poem Prometheus Bound which was written by Aeschylus and is the world’s second oldest play. It shows Prometheus, creative foresight, being crucified and buried by the cunning lords of this world after they have seized power. But Prometheus prophesies that one day he will be released, and tyranny cast down, and men will see their future clear. Aeschylus wrote a sequel, Prometheus Unbound, describing that event. It was lost, and I can tell you why.
“The democracy of Athens, great as it was, flawed as it was, tried to become an empire, was defeated, and finally failed. All the great states which followed it were oligarchies. Some, like Florence and Holland, claimed to be republics, but all were oligarchies in which poets and dramatists were so attached to the prosperous classes that they came to despise, yes really despise, the commoners. They saw them as incurably inferior, deserving a tear and a charitable breadcrust in bad times, but potentially dangerous and at best merely comic, like the grave-diggers in Hamlet. No doubt the rulers of states thought Prometheus Unbound was seditious, but it must also have annoyed educated people by showing how slavish their best hopes had become. They could no longer imagine a good state where intelligence served everyone equally. In twenty-three centuries of human endurance and pain only one hero, Jesus of Nazareth, declared that a common man was the maker of all earthly good, and that by loving and sharing with him we would build the classless kingdom of heaven. And, madam,” I told her, “you know what the churches have made of that message. How cunning the winners are! How horrible!”