So concluded the youthful ruler of Olympus, in his haughty strength. But Prometheus knew mankind better than Zeus. The hills and valleys of earth were his kin, dear and familiar to him; and he had come to love the imperfect human soul that had just managed to get itself born in those rude cave-men. He saw the violent act that the Lord of Olympus was planning in his mind; and resolved to save humanity. So, as the old poet Hesiod says in his _Works and Days_, “he stole fire for men from Zeus the Counsellor in a hollow fennel stalk, what time the Hurler of the Thunder knew not.” But the boon to man meant sheer disaster to himself, as he knew when he filched it from Olympus. The purpose of Zeus could not be thwarted with impunity. Prometheus was condemned to age-long punishment, chained to a rock on an icy mountain top until such time as a deliverer should come, and an immortal being could be found willing to give up life for him. The punishment of Prometheus is the subject of the present drama. It is believed to have been the middle play of a trilogy, of which the last was the _Prometheus Unbound_, and the first probably related the bringing of fire to earth. The _Prometheus Bound_ is not dramatic in the sense that the _Agamemnon_ and the _Choephorœ_ are. There is hardly any action in it, for the suffering Titan continues chained to his rock throughout the poem. From the nature of the theme, too, the characters are too colossal and remote to make an intimate appeal to us. Yet the drama is charged with the deepest emotion, transcending the pity or fear of common experience. If it does not start into life before our eyes as an actual conflict, that is because it is rooted in a deeper and more crucial struggle between cosmic forces. And if the persons of the drama are unapproachable and unfamiliar, it is from the very reason of their sublimity. We see the protagonist first as he is being riveted to the rocky wall by the god Hephæstus. The Fire-god reluctantly performs the task, bidden to it roughly by Force, who is invested for the moment with the strength of Zeus, but without his dignity. Hephæstus is indignant at the sentence on his kinsman, the titan, and declares that he has no heart to chain him in this stormy mountain region, merely because of his beneficent help to man. But Force is inexorable: he urges on the work until every limb of the titan is secured, and an adamantine wedge is driven through his breast. When all is accomplished, Prometheus is left alone; and then for the first time he breaks silence. He invokes the elements that are his kindred: the sky, the winds, the rivers, the smiling sea, the sun, the great earth-mother.