e wrath of the tyrant by sympathy with the afflicted. Alone
again with the Oceanides, the latter burst forth in fresh strains of
pity.

"The wide earth echoes wailingly,
Stately and antique were thy fallen race,
The wide earth waileth thee!
Lo! from the holy Asian dwelling-place,
Fall for a godhead's wrongs, the mortals' murmuring tears,
They mourn within the Colchian land,
The virgin and the warrior daughters,
And far remote, the Scythian band,
Around the broad Maeotian waters,
And they who hold in Caucasus their tower,
Arabia's martial flower
Hoarse-clamouring 'midst sharp rows of barbed spears.

One have I seen with equal tortures riven--
An equal god; in adamantine chains
Ever and evermore
The Titan Atlas, crush'd, sustains
The mighty mass of mighty Heaven,
And the whirling cataracts roar,
With a chime to the Titan's groans,
And the depth that receives them moans;
And from vaults that the earth are under,
Black Hades is heard in thunder;
While from the founts of white-waved rivers flow
Melodious sorrows, wailing with his wo."

Prometheus, in his answer, still farther details the benefits he had
conferred on men--he arrogates to himself their elevation to intellect
and reason [20]. He proceeds darkly to dwell on the power of
Necessity, guided by "the triform fates and the unforgetful Furies,"
whom he asserts to be sovereign over Jupiter himself. He declares
that Jupiter cannot escape his doom: "His doom," ask the daughters of
Ocean, "is it not evermore to reign?"--"That thou mayst not learn,"
replies the prophet; "and in the preservation of this secret depends
my future freedom."

The rejoinder of the chorus is singularly beautiful, and it is with a
pathos not common to Aeschylus that they contrast their present
mournful strain with that which they poured

"What time the silence, erst was broken,
Around the baths, and o'er the bed
To which, won well by many a soft love-token,
And hymn'd by all the music of delight,
Our Ocean-sister, bright
Hesione, was led!"

At the end of this choral song appears Io, performing her mystic
pilgrimage [21]. The utter wo and despair of Io are finely contrasted
with the stern spirit of Prometheus. Her introduction gives rise to
those ancestral and tradi