 Okay, let me catch us up on who Eculus is and what's happened in the 200 years between Hesiod and Eculus, and then we'll come back and compare Eculus's psychology to Hesiod's. Eculus lives around sometime between 525 and 456 BCE. We know he died in 456 BCE. His father was named Euphorian and his son was named Euphorian and he had a grandson named Eculus. That's gonna be important because even though we know that he wrote many plays, there's some dispute as to whether or not the famous Eculus, the playwright, actually wrote Prometheus Bound. The fact that Eculus, son of Euphorian, actually had a grandson who was also Eculus, son of Euphorian, will maybe help explain that, but that's still an unsettled matter. Eculus was a veteran of the Persian Wars and he fought at two of the most famous battles between the Greeks and the Persians at the Battle of Marathon, after which we have the famous story about the Greek veteran who survived the Battle of Marathon after the Greeks had won, ran back to Athens and then collapsed of dead of exhaustion once he had delivered the message and that's where we get our word for the running of a marathon. Eculus was a veteran of Marathon and probably also a veteran of the Battle of the Bay of Salamis and I believe this is the one that's the subject of the second 300 movie. But this is someone who was not just a playwright his whole life. He was very familiar with this emerging city-state, the emerging culture, the emerging identity of the city of Athens which stood against this growing Persian Empire. Remember the same Persian Empire that freed the Israelites and the Judeans from Babylonian captivity and sent them back to Jerusalem. The same Persian Empire made its way across Anatolia and was trying to take over Greece, these individual Greek city-states. The Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta united long enough to defeat the Persians and then to defeat them again and to defeat them once again. And Eculus was right there during these battles. In fact, he identified with his role as a soldier so much that on his tombstone he had a description of himself as a veteran of the Persian Wars rather than identifying himself as a playwright. So it seems that his military career was more important to him, but it's more than just a military career, it's his role as one of these sort of founding members of this emerging city-state of Athens, although Athens had been around a long time. It was just now becoming this major cultural power after defeating the Persians. And Eculus is the first, what I referred to as the three great Greek tragedians, tragedian being a writer of tragedy. After him, shortly, actually during his lifetime, Sophocles and Euripides would begin writing dramas as well. Now when I call him a tragedian, I should disambiguate some of these terms. Drama, as it was defined in the ancient world, Aristotle defines drama as an imitated human action and that includes tragedy and comedy. Later, when we talk about drama specifically, stage drama as opposed to social drama, we mean something like a story told in action by actors who impersonate characters. This is different than a narration. So whether you read a novel or you, if you were listening to Homer sing the Iliad, in all of those cases, a narrator is telling you what the characters said and a narrator is telling you what the characters were thinking and what was happening, what the backstory was. But on the stage, everything is dialogue except for when a narrator comes to tell you what happens between scenes or that sort of thing. And tragedy in this sense does not mean what we typically mean by today. Typically when we use the word tragedy, it means something bad happened. That's not necessarily a tragedy in the Greek sense. Aristotle defines tragedy this way. He says, tragedy is a representation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magnitude. By means of language enriched with all kinds of ornament, each used separately in the different parts of the play. It represents men in action and does not use narrative. In other words, it doesn't just tell you, here's what's happening right now. You have to watch what's happening. The actor has to represent what's happening. And through pity and fear, it affects relief to these and similar emotions. In other words, this drama, we watch these people go through all these different emotional states and it helps us get our own pity and fear out, our own empathy. We sort of purge ourselves of these feelings and we sort of feel differently. Maybe we're more rational after the play is over. We're able to think more clearly after we've sort of gotten all these emotions out of the way in Aristotle's opinion. But notice this does not say, this is a story with a bad ending or that ends badly for somebody. In fact, some of the ancient Greek tragedies like Aeschylus's trilogy, the Oristaya, ends with things working out pretty well in the end. Also, when I use the word chorus and when your text for Prometheus Bown uses the word chorus, this isn't talking about a part of a song but the people singing that song. So it's the singers who act both as narrators and as unnamed background characters both for the sake of exposition. So despite what Aristotle says, the chorus is kind of narrating what's happening. They act as if they're speaking to the other characters but they're sort of telling the audience what's going on because keep in mind that there would be no stage craft. We wouldn't have these nice backdrops like we do in the theater today. So as we move from oral poetry where Homer or Hesiod or some other singer has to describe what the characters are thinking and describe what the characters are saying, we're moving into a new genre and that means a lot of new things become more important than they were in the narrated type of text. Although we will continue to call this narrator for a reason I'll come back to in a minute. But Hesiod remember claim to be speaking for the muses. The muses told him here's the way things work and this allows him not just to say here's what happened as if he witnessed it himself but he's also saying here's what these gods were thinking at the time. There's no way that even if we were there witnessing these things happen, there's no way we would know what was actually in the minds of the individuals present. So he's an inspired performer and it just so happens that community of Anatolians that his father belonged to that came from Anatolia to Greece. They settled in a city called Thespia or Thespis and Thespis literally means divinely inspired. So Hesiod is claiming divine inspiration as the source of his interpretive authority and his narrative authority. Now maybe coincidentally, maybe this is, maybe not a coincidence, but there was a person about a century after Hesiod named Thespis of Vicaria and he is identified as the first actor. Aristotle and others refer back to him and say this was the first person who was actually an actor rather than just a singer of a tale. Someone who didn't perform by describing what happened. Actually he dressed up as the character and then started to save the lines from that character's point of view as if he was that character. It might seem obvious to us now, but this was a big deviation from just describing a character to actually performing that character. He was the first to use a mask and costume. He added speech to what had been formerly a choral performance. In other words, sung in that song is a description of what's happening. He put on the first tragic performance in 533 BCE and his name Thespis, which remember also the city that Hesiod's father lived near, Thespis meant divinely inspired. But after this individual named Thespis, we get the word Thespian for an actor. This is someone who follows in the role of Thespis. Now, Thespis as an actor would be the only one on stage. There would be no dialogue, there would just be him speaking a soliloquy from his own point of view, from that character's point of view. It was actually Esculis that added to this a second actor, someone else who would have this conversation. So you would need at least two actors to have an actual conversation. And Esculis was the first person to add that element. Greek drama itself appears to have evolved out of ritual, out of a sacrifice. It seems that at one point, there would be a sacrifice to the gods and there would be a chorus there sort of singing about that God, singing praises to that God and singing the stories that connected with that God. But then later, instead of just singing about that God, you would have somebody like Thespis playing the role of that God and doing it in front of the altar for everyone else to watch. And as this became more of a performance, you started to get more crowds showing up and as you got more crowds showing up, they started to build these amphitheaters into hillside so that more and more people could be seated very far away and still hear what was being said. So our earliest drama would not have had fancy scenery, wouldn't have any scenery really at all. You'd have the altar behind you. And everything would have to be your imagination. You would see these two actors or maybe more as time goes on. They would be wearing masks, but as far as whether there was a mountain in the background or a tree nearby or the gods writing chariots or something, all of that had to depend on dialogue. You had to hear them describe it. Usually the chorus pointing at something and saying, this is what we see far away. But this, the theater was extremely important in, as Athens developed during its fifth century era. And it was so important that every citizen of the city was expected to attend or was encouraged to attend to the extent that oftentimes they were sort of, tax money was collected so that they could allocate so they can make people able to come to these performances. They were extremely political, although most of these plays were about the gods. There would be something that was obliquely a reference to things going on in local politics at the time. And that was considered a good thing. You wanted people discussing politics and seeing this narrative or seeing this play acted out with the sorts of themes that people are concerned about. The performances provoked political discussions. That was part of why they were important. These plays would be important because they provoked difficult conversations and caused people to sort of have to point out details and conflicts of interest and situations that really made heavy demands or situations that demanded more thought than people might typically give it. Eskulis being the first playwright in the sense of modern drama was very prolific. He, we know from references by other authors that he wrote at least 90 plays, maybe more. Unfortunately, only seven of these survive and they're individual parts of trilogies. We have one complete trilogy in the sense of this is three plays that continue the same story. Now there were competitions at the time where one playwright would write a trilogy that would usually have a fourth play, which was a comedy, so they have three tragedies in a comedy and usually the three tragedies would all be about the same theme, but they wouldn't be a continuous story. It's Eskulis that really made these trilogies an extended narrative. But he wrote the Persians, which is the only thing that's come down to us that's about contemporary events. In other words, it's not about the gods and it's not about people in the past. It's about the Persian wars in which he served. But notice when he writes the Persians, he's having to get into the minds of the people that were his enemy. And he's having to think, well, how do these Persians really think? And he does a very sort of sympathetic job, a way that we don't often see in time when two cultures are at war where one culture actually shows the complicated psychology of the other culture. He's most famous for the Ors-style, which is three plays about the king during the Trojan War, Agamemnon, and his murder by his wife, Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra's murder by her son, Orestes, and then the problem Orestes is in, the fact that the Furies, these monstrous goddesses, would punish anyone who shed the blood of their own family. But Agamemnon had to, in order to sail to Troy, he had to sacrifice his own daughter. So he had to make this impossible choice between his own family and the entire Greek army that was stranded and was not gonna be able to sail to Troy. After that, his wife takes revenge on him. And then that means her son is in this position where he's morally obligated by their culture to avenge his father, but he's also morally obligated not to shed the blood of his mother. And because he kills her, the fates pursue him, but then his punishment or innocence or guilt has to be decided by a court case, essentially, where the goddess Athena presides over this first court case to decide whether Orestes should be punished for eternity or not. So the political aspects of this, even though they're describing something from the Trojan War, are very much focused on the way a justice system should work. And this is a very philosophical topic at a time when the way the court of Athens is being sort of constructed, the constitution is being scripted. Prometheus Bound was part of a trilogy. And we know this because other authors refer to these other plays. And we have a few quotations from Prometheus Unbound. And we only have one quotation from the play Prometheus Flame Bearer. But we know that Prometheus Bound was clearly not, the end of Prometheus Bound was not the end of Prometheus in Estuos's larger narrative. Now, the plays were either ordered with Prometheus Bound first, followed by Prometheus Unbound, where Heracles comes to rescue him, kills the bird that's tearing out his liver, and there's his reconciliation with Zeus. And that was either followed by a play titled Prometheus Flame Bearer, or what maybe seems more likely is that Prometheus Flame Bearer may have actually come first. It may have been a story about Prometheus actually doing the stealing of fire, that action itself. But we don't really know. We don't have enough information about Prometheus Flame Bearer to really figure that out. But even though we only have Prometheus Bound, and we don't have enough of the other two to really tell what was going on, Prometheus Bound is enough to show us that this is a very different version of Prometheus than what we saw in Hesiod. And it's a very different psychology. And also the genre of drama forces us to look at individual characters and consider different points of view in ways that we didn't have to do in order to figure out what was happening in Hesiod. Hesiod tells us this is the way things happened. This is what Zeus was thinking. He adds these interpretations to the descriptions of the basic elements. Estulus can't do that because if he's depending on actors, he doesn't have the liberty of a narrator to just say, here's what this character was thinking. Everything depends on the dialogue. One of the first characters we see is the character of Kratos, who in your text is, they just use the name Power. Well, the Greek term, the Greek name is Kratos. And yes, I suppose this is where the God of War video game character comes from. But Kratos in this representation has a very familiar psychology. He has the sort of authoritarian psychology that we saw Hesiod demonstrating. Whatever Zeus does is right because Zeus is the one that's the most powerful. So, but the genre of drama, especially when Estulus adds this, you know, the second actor to the stage, makes this clear distinction between the point of view of each character and the presumably omniscient point of view of the narrator. Hesiod may be telling us the way things are, but the characters can only tell us the way they think things are in a drama. They could be wrong. We might forget that the narrator's point of view is just a point of view, but when we see characters arguing, we don't slip into that mode of sort of passive acceptance. We hear Kratos, the personification of power, speaking in terms similar to Hesiod, but he's just a character, he's not the narrator, so we don't necessarily believe him. We just see the way he thinks, and we compare that to the way other creatures or other characters think. So he says to Hephaistus, describing what Prometheus has done, you know, flashing fire, the source of all arts, he, Prometheus, has bestowed upon mortal creatures. In other words, he's broken the social order. Such is his offense. For this, he is bound to make requital to the gods so that he may learn to bear with the sovereignty of Zeus and cease his man-loving ways. Man-loving means, you know, these ephemeroi, the word means literally creatures of a day, because human beings are born and die and the gods live forever, so why should you give any importance whatsoever to these weak, pathetic creatures who don't live forever? He's accusing Prometheus of breaking the social order as Zeus has established it. He says, every job is troublesome except to be the commander of the gods. No one is free except Zeus. As Hesiod said, you know, Zeus decides who's gonna be praised and who's gonna be condemned, who's going to be successful and who's not. It doesn't matter what they do. And for all his cleverness, Prometheus is a fool compared to Zeus. So in other, he doesn't just say, here's the way the world is and here's the way we should regard Zeus, but also his criteria for what is intelligent, what is wise, depends on how you interact with Zeus. So when he looks at Prometheus, he doesn't see wisdom. He sees foolishness because it has led to Prometheus's being tortured like this. That's all that matters for Kratos. Prometheus has now lost all power. That means that what he did is foolish. There's no other criteria that he considers. We see basically the same thing happening with Hermes and Hermes, the Roman god Mercury, the messenger of the gods, is another god that's supposedly very intelligent, is known for intelligence. He's credited in some Greek text with giving human beings the ability to write, the technology of writing. But obviously an inesculous writing is given to humans from Prometheus. But he says to Prometheus, to you, the clever and crafty, bitter beyond all bitterness, who has sinned against the gods and bestowing honors upon these creatures of a day, these ephemeroi. To you, thief of fire, I speak. The father commands that you tell what marriage you boast of. So Prometheus has said out loud that he knows that eventually Zeus is going to have a child with this particular female, maybe a goddess, maybe a human. But the son that that woman bears is going to overthrow Zeus. He's gonna be more powerful than him. But he doesn't know who. And of course Zeus is a philanderer, so he has to be careful. And he wants to know who this is so that he doesn't end up like his own father and his grandfather overthrown by the next generation. So the father commands you to tell what marriage you boast of. Whereby he is to be hurled from power. And this, Mark Well, set forth in no riddling fashion, but point by point. In other words, give it to me straight, don't hide it in this riddling language. Explain point by point as the case exactly stands. And do not impose upon me a double journey, Prometheus. In other words, don't make me come back and ask you twice. You see, Zeus is not appeased by dealing such as yours. So this criteria of what is right, what you ought to do is based exclusively on what would appease Zeus. Appeasing power, that is the right thing to do. That is the only intelligent thing to do, according to Hermes. Bend your will, perverse fool. O bend your will at last to wisdom in face of your present sufferings. In other words, wisdom is appeasing Zeus. Wisdom is giving in to power, according to Hermes. This is no counterfeited vaunting, but utter truth. For the mouth of Zeus does not know how to utter falsehood, but will bring to pass every word. In other words, it's impossible for Zeus to lie because in saying it, Zeus makes it happen. We all have to just recognize that whatever Zeus says becomes true. We don't question it ourselves. We don't try to prove Zeus wrong. May you consider warily and reflect and never deem stubbornness better than wise counsel. So both Kratos and Hermes are giving us this authoritarian view of what is right and wrong, what's to be considered intelligent, and that sort of thing. Then we see a more sympathetic point of view from Hephaistus. Hephaistus clearly wants to support Prometheus. He feels like what Prometheus did came from a good place, at least. But he knows that he doesn't have the ability himself to decide what to do in this matter. He has to help Zeus by binding Prometheus in these chains that can't be broken. And he says, speaking to Kratos and Bea, power and force, personified. Power and force, for you indeed, the behest of Zeus is now fulfilled, and nothing remains to stop you. But for me, I do not have the nerve myself to bind with force a kindred God upon this rocky cleft assailed by cruel winter. Yet come what may, I'm constrained to summon courage to this deed, for it is perilous to disregard the commandments of the Father. In other words, courage means I have to do this thing because I'm afraid of Zeus. Courage is not exactly what we might otherwise call courage, but he's got to summon the will to do what he's told. Maybe not what we mean by will, either. But two things that he doesn't want to do, and he decides to do the thing that will be the least dangerous for him. And then he says to Prometheus, lofty-minded son of Themis, who counsels straight, against my will, no less than yours, I must rivet you with the brazen bonds, no hand can loose this desolate crag. So he's apologizing to Prometheus, but also saying, I have to do this. The heart of Zeus is hard, and everyone is harsh whose power is new. So he's recognizing more so than Hermes or Kratos that Zeus has his own psychology, and it may be a changing one. It's not just some universal truth that Zeus speaks, but he's this young God, he's now in power, and anyone who's new in power tends to be a little too harsh. They may be a little too abusive with their power. So Hephaistus is sort of thinking about Zeus' thinking, but he's not gonna go so far as to challenge it. Like Hephaistus, the Chorus has a sympathetic disposition toward Prometheus, but they seem to encourage him to just accept the order created by Zeus. So they respond to seeing Io by saying, May Zeus who apportions everything never set his power in conflict with my will, nor might I be slow to approach the gods with holy sacrifices of oxen slain. By the side of the ceaseless stream of oceanus, my father, and may I not offend in speech, but may this rule abide in my heart and never fade away. Sweet it is to pass all life, all length of life amid confident hopes, feeding the heart in glad festivities, but I shudder to look on you, wracked by infinite tortures. You have no fear of Zeus, Prometheus, but in self will you reverence mortals too much. So even though they sympathize with Prometheus, they still place the blame on him, rather than seeing any kind of moral culpability in Zeus himself. They say, why is there they who do homage to necessity, being just the way things are done, rather than looking to change it? Their father, Oceanus, also empathizes with Prometheus, and he does seem to think that there is some need to work with Zeus, but he seems to believe that he can negotiate the situation. Rather than just passively appeasing Zeus's will, he says that he's going to go speak with Zeus, try to reason with him, have him change his mind about Prometheus, but he also tells Prometheus, he says, learn to know yourself, and adapt yourself to new ways, for new also is the ruler among the gods. If you hurl forth words so harsh and of such wetted edge, perhaps Zeus may hear you, though thrown from far off, high in the heavens, and then your present multitude of sorrows shall seem childish sport, or wretched sufferer, put away your wrathful mood and try to find reliefs from these miseries. Perhaps this advice may seem to you odd and dull, but your plight, Prometheus, is only the wages of too boastful speech. You still have not learned humility, nor do you bend before misfortune. His message is, essentially, keep quiet and let me work on this, or see what we can work out. It's non-confrontational, but it's not as passive as the strategies of Hephaistus or the Chorus. One element of the story we can definitely say has been added by Esculis is the presence of Io. Notice that Hesiod focuses on Prometheus in relationship to Pandora. There is no mention of Io in relationship to Prometheus elsewhere in the literature up to this point. It seems that Esculis inserted Io as a character into this, not because she previously had any role in the Prometheus story, but because she is an example of the excess of power. What has been done to her through no fault of her own is a testament to just how wrong Oceanus and even Hephaistus, but of course Hermes and Kratos for power, all tell Prometheus that if he just gives in to Zeus's will, then his misfortune will not be so bad, that we all have to sort of bend to Zeus's will. But if we do that, then we're smart. But when Io steps into the scene, we're confronted with someone who has done nothing wrong, someone who has tried to do the best thing she had available, but her options from the time Zeus's attention turned toward her, she was in a no-win situation. So the story she tells us is that she finds out from a vatic oracle, someone who knows what's going on with the gods, that Zeus is attracted to her and that she's supposed to go out into the fields at night and have a rendezvous with Zeus. But of course she doesn't want to do that. For one thing, everyone who has a relationship with Zeus, whether or not it's their initiative, incurs the wrath of Hera. Zeus's wife, Queen of the Gods, can't take out her anger on Zeus directly, so she always attacks the women that Zeus lusts after. So if she says no to Zeus, then she's gonna incur Zeus's wrath. If she does not say no to Zeus, then she's going to incur Hera's wrath. And she goes to ask her father what she should do about that and her father consults this oracle named Loxius. And Loxius says the only thing that you can do is send her away because bad things are going to happen to her. But if she stays here and does not give in to Zeus as well, then Zeus will take out his anger and punish our entire people. So to save her own people, she has to leave. She has to go off on her own. But still, Io has done everything she could. She's bowed to authority. She gave in to her father's authority. Her father gave in to the religious authority who was speaking on behalf of Zeus. She's, through no fault of her own, she's being punished by Zeus, by Zeus's irresponsible actions, his sort of self-serving abuse of power. And we hear this from her point of view directly. We hear Prometheus who knows her story already, but also we hear her ask why is this happening to me? She says, where is my far roaming wandering course taking me? In what, Oson of Cronus, in other words, she's talking to Zeus as if he was there. Oson of Cronus, in what have you found a fence so that you have bound me to this yoke of misery? Are you harassing a wretched maiden to frenzy by this terror of the pursuing gadfly? Consume me with fire or hide me in the earth or give me to the monsters of the deep to devour? But do not grudge, oh Lord, the favor that I pray for. It's Prometheus that tells her this is because of Hera. Hera is sending these things because Zeus lusted after her. But she's still in this no-win situation. Not because of her own actions, but because powerful beings, people, or entities higher than her in the social hierarchy want things that are in conflict with each other and she's at the center of that conflict through no fault of her own. And of course, this is also the first time we hear Prometheus describe his own thinking from his own point of view. Hesiod never really gives us much about Prometheus in his own terms. How does he consider, or how does he think of, how does he justify his stealing of fire from the gods and giving it to humans? We don't get that in Hesiod. We don't get that in other versions of this story that come before Asculus. It's simply a description of the thing he did and why it was a bad thing because it crossed the all-powerful Zeus. And the interesting thing is we don't get a consistent point of view from him. He changes his mind, he sort of goes back and forth. He feels one way in one scene and then he makes a recognition that changes his thinking about his situation. At first, and often throughout the play, he'll say things like, look at what a shameful torture I'm wracked with and must wrestle throughout the countless years of time apportioned to me. Such as the ignominious bondage, the new commander of the blessed has devised against me. Whoa, for my present misery and misery to come, I've grown not knowing where it has faded that deliverance from these sorrows shall arise. So he's speaking out of pain, he's speaking out of a reaction to his situation that seems overwhelming, and he's saying I don't know how this is going to go. But then in the very next line, he says, and yet what am I saying? All that is to be I know full well and in advance, nor shall any affliction come upon me on foreseen. I must bear my allotted doom as lightly as I can. So he sort of remembers that I do know what's going to happen next, and I do know why this is happening. And I do know that it's almost as if he affirms the decision that he's already made. Yet I am not able to speak nor be silent about my fate, for it is because I bestowed good gifts on mortals that this miserable yoke of constraint has been bound upon me. I hunted out and stored in fennel stock the stolen source of fire that proved a teacher to mortals in every art and means to a mighty ends, such as the offense for which I pay the penalty, riveted in fetters beneath the open sky. So he's remembering that this current state he's in is something that he knew he would be in, but he also sort of affirms the reason for doing it in the first place. And he dismisses those like the Oceanids, the Chorus, as well as Hermes and Kratos, when he says, you know, worship a door, fawn upon whoever is your Lord. But he remembers also that he saw Zeus overthrow his own father, Cronus. He saw Cronus overthrow his father, Uranus, and he knows that Zeus himself is not eternal. This is a very different description of Zeus than we got in Hesiod. Prometheus is aware of Zeus' limitations, of Zeus' fate. And so he says, have I not seen two sovereigns cast out from these heights? A third, the present Lord shall live to see, I shall live to see cast out and ruin most shameful and most swift. So by describing Zeus as the present Lord, he is limiting him in time. This is not Zeus eternal. This is not Zeus the unstoppable, the Zeus the ultimate authority. This is the guy who happens to be ahead of the game right now. And in that, Prometheus introduces a very different perspective on Zeus. In all of these characters' descriptions of themselves and their descriptions of other characters, we get, we as the audience or we as the readers, get much more into the psychology, into the way that these characters think than we ever could have in Hesiod. Now that's not to say that drama naturally is more focused on the thoughts of the characters. Because when we get to Homer, we'll see the narrator can give us a lot of each individual character's point of view and show us how those characters are in conflict. But drama has to, drama, unless you had actors just sort of narrating their parts, in which case that might even be an internal monologue, all you have are these different perspectives. And when you see those perspectives aren't always accurate, when people underestimate other characters or when characters think other characters are planning something that they're not actually planning or they don't see the danger that the other characters is plotting. All of this takes us into what a psychologist called theory of mind. And theory of mind, one of the earliest definitions is theory of mind is the capacity to impute mental states to self and others and to predict behavior on the basis of these states. So in other words, this is my ability to try to figure out what you're thinking based on cues and the way and the things you say, but not just the content of your words, but maybe the tone of your speech, maybe your body language, maybe knowing your history and knowing that, oh, when you use this phrase, it's an exaggeration, but when you use this phrase, it's an understatement. You're hiding something, there's something you don't wanna tell. So it's never just gauging someone else's thoughts by the words they use. And anthropologist Robert Dunbar says that having a theory of mind means being able to understand what another individual is thinking to ascribe beliefs, desires, fears, and hopes to someone else and to believe that they really do experience these feelings as mental states. When we engage with another person, when we talk to another person, we're not only thinking about what they may be referring to, but we're also trying to represent ourselves a certain way. We want them to think well of us. We want them to not think we're plotting against them or we want them to take us seriously, not think that we're lying to them and this sort of thing. Even if we are, and if we are lying to someone, then we don't want them to know that we're lying. But I might also wonder, is this person lying to me? Does this person actually know what he or she is talking about? Or could this person be mistaken? If we're talking about a third person who's not present, I have to think about how well the person I'm talking to knows the person she or he is talking about. How well they know that other person's mind. And maybe I know that person's mind better than they do, but maybe I only think I do. When we have an ordinary conversation, we have to engage in theory of mind to several different levels. And when we read fiction, we usually have to go one or two steps beyond that because we have an author representing these characters to us. So sometimes we may doubt how well that author really knows his or her characters or how a representation of a character in narrative may not do the story justice. And we can usually tell when we read badly written characters that make decisions that don't seem to go with their, the way they've been represented so far, that even the author doesn't have total control over any kind of representation of the mind of the character or the mind of the characters see in other characters. And psychologist David Comer-Kid and Emmanuel Costano published a study in the journal Science back in 2013 and which they tested people's theory of mind after they read nonfiction like scientific works, that are very intelligent require a lot of intelligence but they're not about people and people thinking about people. They compared those people to people who had just read literary fiction that involves people trying to represent themselves and try to understand other people. And they found that people who had just read the fiction, the literary fiction, were much better at figuring out from subtle facial cues and subtle tells what people were actually thinking if someone was angry but trying to sort of suppress that face, they would see a picture and they would be able to accurately guess that this person is angry as opposed to just saying this person looks bored or something like that. And they say that the capacity to identify and understand other subjective states is one of the most stunning products of human evolution. It allows successful navigation of complex social relationships and helps to support the empathic responses that maintain them. Empathy meaning that I'm trying to be able to figure out what's going on in your head. More critically, whereas many of our mundane social experiences may be scripted by convention and scripted here means the same thing it means in Shank and Abelson's term of a cognitive script. Many of our mundane social experiences may be scripted by convention and informed by stereotypes. Those presented in literary fiction often disrupt our expectations. In other words, defamiliarize us, make us look at something that we might dismiss as familiar and we might not really look at that closely, but instead say, wait, our expectations may not be enough. The usual schemas that we apply to a person or the usual scripts that we apply to a situation may not be enough. I may need to reassess what's going on here. So readers of literary fiction must draw more flexible interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters. That is, they must engage in theory of mind processes. Now, you've had to do this before. The last time I talked about theory of mind was when we read in Atrahasis. This strategy that Enki had in order to get the gods, Namtara and Adad, to remove the plagues that they had sent on humanity, the plague in Namtara's case and the drought in Adad's case. And to do that, Enki tells Atrahasis to tell the humans to not make any sacrifices to the gods, but then eventually make a sacrifice to either Namtara or Adad each of those individual times and then make them feel ashamed. Make Namtara and Adad realize that they have been given this gift by the people that they are harming and so that they'll feel shame and then they'll take the plague or the drought away. And this seems to work. We don't get much of an explanation about it, but we have to understand, in order to understand what's going on there, we have to understand why Adad and Namtara will feel bad and why they will remove the affliction, which means we have to understand what Atrahasis is trying to get them to do, which means we have to understand how Enki is trying to get Atrahasis to think about how Namtara and Adad will think about him and the other humans. That means one mind has to think about how another mind can understand another mind and then we as readers have to understand all three of those levels or all four of those levels. And so when we have this debate between Oceanus and Prometheus about how to deal with Zeus, Oceanus is trying to help Prometheus out, but clearly they disagree on the kind of strategy. Oceanus maybe doesn't take it quite as seriously as Prometheus does. So it goes this way. Oceanus says, do you not know then, Prometheus, that words are the physicians of a disordered temper? That sounds like a nice little aphorism, a nice little sort of platitude or cliche that kind of people can use as a script and say, well, words are the physicians of a disordered temper. Zeus has a disordered temper and speak to him nicely and you can solve that problem, but it's a little too simple for Prometheus. Prometheus says, if one softens the soul in season and does not hasten to reduce its swelling rage by violence, in other words, it depends on the state of mind of the person you're talking to, in which case if I go talk to Zeus right now, he's probably just going to lash out and use violence. Oceanus responds, what lurking mischief do you see when daring joins to zeal? Teach me this, he's being a little bit sarcastic. And Prometheus replies, lost labors and thoughtless simplicity. In other words, he's not going to just do the easy thing because this simplistic thing will undo all that he's done before. Maybe Oceanus doesn't necessarily get what Prometheus is saying. Oceanus responds, leave me to be affected by this since it is most advantageous when truly wise to be deemed a fool. Again, you know, it sounds like Sun Sa, the Chinese philosopher, when strong appear weak, when weak appear strong. So he's saying, let's just play dumb, let's just play simple and go talk to Zeus. And Prometheus acknowledges that he has been referred to as a fool this whole time. So far, Kratos has called him a fool. And Hephaistus and the Chorus have both implied that he's not doing the intelligent thing. So Prometheus realizes how other people see him, how their theory of mind represents him. And he says, this fault of being truly wise but being deemed a fool, this fault will be seen to be my own. Oceanus says, clearly the manner of your speech orders me back home. So he's not even responding to exactly what Prometheus has said, he's responding to the tone of voice. To Oceanus, is that Prometheus is simply getting tired of talking to him. Prometheus says, so that you won't win enmity for yourself by lamenting for me. In other words, Prometheus is sort of agreeing, yes, I want you to go home instead of going to talk to Zeus on my behalf. It's not because I'm tired of you or annoyed with you, it's because I don't want Zeus to turn on you. You're a little too confident and you think your ability to go reason with Zeus is going to work out and it may actually backfire and hurt you as well. Oceanus says, in the eyes of the one who is newly seated on his omnipotent throne, in other words, Zeus, you're afraid of Zeus being angry at me. Prometheus says, beware lest the time come when his heart is angered against you. And Oceanus says, your plight Prometheus is my instructor. So Oceanus is trying to figure out how Zeus is thinking about Prometheus. Maybe this is someone I can reason with, maybe it's not. But Prometheus, in order to protect Oceanus, has to think about how Zeus sees him, how Zeus will react with rage or with emotion rather than with reason if he goes to reason with him. And he'll react that way against Prometheus and he'll react that way against Oceanus. And you might add another step here that I don't have in the diagram, which is Prometheus has to think about how Oceanus does not understand Zeus. Oceanus' idea of how Zeus will react is not the way Prometheus thinks. Zeus will actually react. So he's got to keep in mind how Zeus will regard Oceanus and how, in contrast to that, how Oceanus thinks Zeus will react to Oceanus. And throughout the play, we see Prometheus describing these other characters. Sometimes to them directly, sometimes as sort of an argument, sometimes it's in order to protect them or to sympathize with them. The way he sees Io and understands her suffering, he doesn't just see that this is not something I want to happen to me, but he empathizes. He feels her pain not as a warning to him, but as something that is wrong, something that upsets him itself. So her pain hurts him. That's empathy. He understands, or he tries to figure out what Oceanus understands and what Oceanus doesn't understand. And he can pretty easily see the error in Hermes and Kratos' thinking, but he also sees how they see him. He sees why Hephaistus has to do what he has to do because he's afraid to do otherwise. And clearly he spends a lot of time trying to understand Zeus' thinking, representing Zeus' thinking. But notice he also has to sort of have this idea of himself as not Prometheus bound. He's got two different sort of temperaments. He goes back and forth between the character of the Prometheus who is bound, the Prometheus who is defeated, who is being tormented. But he also knows that he is Prometheus the Flamebringer. Remember this is the title of one of the other plays in this trilogy by Aeschylus. These are not just two different plays, these are two different identities. And we might go further and say that when he eventually is unbound, he's going to be unbound by Heracles and it's, according to Hesiod, it will be Zeus' will that Heracles frees Prometheus. But that's not his only identity. He's not just someone whose fate is up to someone else. He is there by his choice. He chose to help humanity. He knew he would be punished for it, but he still thought it was the right thing to do in spite of Zeus' will. So Zeus' power to enforce a particular outcome was not his criteria for deciding what the wise thing to do was, what the right thing to do was. He is breaking free from this moral order that everyone else seems to be pushing him to accept. And so he has to understand their minds. He has to understand how they understand him, but he has to fight their understanding of who he is or who he ought to be or how his mind is working and contrast that with the person or the Titan that he wants to be. He wants to not just be Prometheus bound, not just be the submissive Prometheus that does whatever Zeus wants, but the Prometheus who is the patron of humanity and human civilization, who is willing to sacrifice himself. So he has to keep reminding himself who he is, not this bound Titan, but the flame bringer, this champion who has to stand up to power, who has to stand up to Zeus' tyranny in order to be that larger version of Prometheus in order to not be the weak bound Prometheus. And so what Escalus is doing is very different than what Hesiod is doing as a narrator. Hesiod just tells us this is the way things are. Escalus shows us well this character thinks it's this way and this character thinks it's this way. So he's not just telling us the way the world is, he's asking, he's comparing all these different points of view and he's not even coming in in the end and saying this is the way it is. Now maybe the final play of the trilogy which we don't have, maybe it has something more didactic, more direct. But what Hesiod is doing is, I'm sorry, what Escalus is doing is replacing Hesiod's answers with better questions. And what he's doing is something that is going to be what we remember fifth century Athens for being. That is the home of philosophy, of questioning, of inquiry. And this is really where Hesiod was this sort of, had this sort of authoritarian psychology where he just said, you know, Zeus is the creator of the order, Zeus knows everything. Just obey the order as you find it, submit to it and accept your place and accept the place of everyone else and don't try to change it. And Prometheus was bad for trying to upset that order or at least what he did was foolish or unwise. In contrast to that, Escalus doesn't say know what Prometheus did was wise but he at least gives us Prometheus's point of view in which what Prometheus did was wise. But he contrasts that to these other characters point of view which say it wasn't. So by comparing these different types of interpretations, he is acting as a philosopher. He's acting as someone who can look at the order, the way things are, the way people conventionally think and question it. And not necessarily jump to a particular conclusion, not just reject conventional wisdom and adopt the opposite. So the opposite of authoritarianism here is not anti-authoritarianism. It's easy to be anti-authoritarian when you're not the authority but then people who start off as anti-authoritarians typically when they get into a good position they tend to say, okay, well let's keep the order the way it is now, now that I'm on top. So it's not necessarily anti-authoritarianism so much as the free inquiry of philosophy. You know, now when we tend to use the word philosophy in common use to just mean whatever you happen to think. Like if someone says, well, you know, my philosophy is just do it. Well, that's not a philosophy that's cliche. It's the Nike brand logo. A philosophy is, it literally means the love of wisdom and it's inquiry. It's not just sort of finding these vague answers that appease our illusion of knowledge. It's defamiliarizing ourself from the world we think we know and saying, well maybe I don't know it that well. So the vague schemas and scripts that we never question, that's not philosophy. Philosophy as the ancient Greeks established it was critical inquiry, investigating all things we think we already know. It's not a bunch of vague platitudes that you can find in a quote pick meme or something like that. It evolves more questions and answers but they're better questions. They're questions that at least help us dispel the illusion of knowledge. Escalus was writing his play a generation or so before Socrates begins his quest to question everything in Athenian culture. But there were still quite a few important Greek philosophers before Socrates who were contemporaries of Escalus or came just before Escalus. So Escalus, remember, lives between 525 and 456 BCE. Thales and Anaximander and Pythagoras came a generation before him. Anaximonies and Exagoras and Pettichles, Xeno and Heraclitus were all contemporaries and Parminides were all contemporaries of Escalus. And so these philosophers, while these philosophers were examining the world through dialogue and discussion directly, Escalus was doing much the same thing but he was doing it through this performance, through this ritual, this, you know, remember that drama evolved from this religious ritual and now it's become this sort of political thought experiment where people watch these dynamics play out between these different characters and then talk about it afterwards. So Escalus is very much at the heart of the origins of Greek philosophy as we remember it today. So as the opposite of authoritarianism, philosophical inquiry doesn't simply accept the status quo, doesn't simply accept the hierarchy, doesn't accept inequality that is the sort of natural order of things under the authoritarian psychology. It's more egalitarian, there's more social mobility. Socrates started off as a slave and sort of became who he was because people listened to him. You know, he would not have become the sort of famous father of philosophy that he did if people weren't, you know, if other intellectual people weren't willing to listen to this low status person. Authority isn't just dismissed, you know, this is not anti-authoritarian but authority is said to be derived from the social contract. You know, as members or as citizens of Athens, every voting citizen had a sort of responsibility, had a role, had a certain importance and anyone who wanted authority over everyone else had to justify that authority by the social contract, by this agreement and that archon, that ruler, even if there, when there was one, was subject to public accountability. Now this wouldn't always be the case in Athens, especially during the wartime, it would be this up and down, there would be tyrants and that word tyrant and at this time, simply meant a king who was not regulated by a constitution, by certain, you know, sort of formal social contract ahead of time. And during times of war, you know, essentially they were under a type of martial law but it was always something that was open to criticism, something that people, you know, frequently voiced their dissatisfaction with and so the philosophers were always there. They weren't always in charge, they didn't always get their way. In fact, you know, Socrates gets put to death by the Council of Athens because he's questioning too much. So, you know, there's always going to be that authoritarian backlash but there were enough of these inquirers, these philosophers in Athens at this time that they were able to sort of destabilize that social hierarchy. They were more cosmopolitan. These guys came from all different city states. Some came from, you know, islands on the other side of the Mediterranean, as far away as Sicily. They were okay with experimenting and they were open to new ideas, new explanations of things, whether they were actual direct experiments or just thought experiments where you say, well, in this situation, would this be okay or would this be okay? And those sort of thought experiments are ideal, the ideal subjects for playwrights like Aeschylus. Violence wasn't, you know, violence was very much a part and militarism was very much a part of Athenian society, you know, first during the Persian wars and then later in the wars with Sparta. But it was only considered virtuous when it was preceded by deliberation and when the warriors and the military as a whole showed a certain amount of restraint. And so later during the wars with Sparta, the historian Thucydides will be very critical of his own city-state Athens, but also of the Spartans and he'll praise each of them equally. So it's not simply, you know, submission to the group. And then rather than seeing the golden age as something that happened in the past, they see progress as this sort of continuing development, this gradual improvement. And that if there is a golden age, it will be ahead of us, but of course it will be so far ahead that we may not get to enjoy it. The best we can do is just make a few improvements at the time. Roles for women may not be great at this point. This is still a very, you know, the gender politics are still very structured. But notice that we are not, Esculis does not portray women anything like what Hesiod does. Hesiod just sees women as the beautiful evil, these temptresses that pretend to be good but are actually destructive and because they're not hardworking, they just want to be parasites on the hardworking men. Clearly, Esculis represents, in IO, deliberately chooses this female character to show the abuses that she is especially subject to. And with the recognition that as long as women are lower in the social hierarchy, they will be more easily victimized. They will be the tyranny, the sort of trickle down tyranny that starts at the top. Men will always be able to take out their frustration on someone. Even a male that is abused by every other level of society, he can still turn around and abuse his wife. So women are still in a very vulnerable position in this sort of power dynamic and that will continue throughout the ancient world. But Esculis is calling attention to that fact. He's not letting somebody like Hezzi be so dismissive. And the connection of the character Prometheus with this new emerging Athenian philosophical culture, with Athens as the sort of meeting place of all of these different philosophers. This Prometheus's role was commemorated there in Plato's Academy, the first sort of university where people didn't just study a trade or there were schools across Mesopotamia and Egypt where people learned to write, but it's not just about learning some particular skill and copying the text that you're handed. Now Plato's Academy, the purpose of it is to start asking questions, start investigating, start to try to really begin to ask questions about the world around us rather than just passing on past knowledge. And in that Academy, we're told later by Pausanias, in the Academy there is an altered Prometheus and from it the students run to the city carrying burning torches and the contest is while running to keep the torch a lit. And carrying the torch will later show up in the Olympic games and it's still a part of our tradition today. But that torch is lit from the altar of Prometheus. So in that Academy, they remember Prometheus not just as this sort of trickster figure or this defiant foolish titan who thought he was gonna get away with fooling Zeus. They see Prometheus as this figure who asked questions even when he was under threat, even when the authority figure wanted to suppress that question, wanted to suppress that progress. He knowingly defied the order, defied the authority in order to help humans become the sort of thinking self-critical open-minded creatures that they would become. And so if we talk about Prometheus today, we still have that cautionary tale that where Frankenstein is the modern Prometheus or the Prometheus is the ship that goes too far out and brings back something dangerous. There's still that heziad sort of warning. But this is also the icon of technology and of learning and of question-asking that has given us the society that we have today. If you're interested in more resources for Greek mythology in particular, I know a lot of people took this class, some of you told me you took this class specifically because you're interested in mythology. I highly recommend, as always, I recommend primarily going to the primary texts themselves. So in that case, that would be Apollodorus's Biblioteca or the library, and there's a great addition that combines that with Hygenus's Fabulae. These are both deliberately, these are two people who went out and collected stories, collected myths, and combined them all into these two books. The Roman writer Abed does the same thing in the Metamorphosis in that, by the way, is Io on the front. I'm pretty sure that's Io. She's got the horns that she's been afflicted with. And also there's a great sort of anthology of classical myth that has primary sources that's called the Anthology of Classical Myth. These are better than the sort of vague descriptions about well Zeus was the god of thunder and the king of the gods, and here are all his characteristics. You wanna, in this as well as any other kind of literature, remember it is literature, find the actual text, find the sources for this. But Prometheus in particular figures into something that is more wide-reaching. That is Hans Blumenberg's book, Work on Myth, and that is a quite a large book. But Blumenberg sort of applies the character of Prometheus. He traces the different stories about Prometheus across the last 2,500 years and looks at how different societies and different philosophies adapt that character and the sort of dynamics about a power that he represents and a philosophy and of human aspiration that he represents in different eras and how different eras respond to that. Also, you've got two great resources for free online. One is Theoi Text or Theoi Library. This was a resource put together by Aaron Atsma, who's between the Netherlands and New Zealand. This is a project that's been put together over the last 17 years and it's a great resource. It's where I'm sending you to read the Iliad and the Odyssey or those excerpts. It's relatively readable translation and he has a lot of other texts. He has Apollodorus and Hygienus and Ovid. These are older translations because they're in the public domain, they're a little bit older so they're a little harder to read but as far as online freely available resources, that's the easiest place to find them. The Perseus Project at Tufts University is a great place to, it also has a lot of these texts in collection and they have direct comparisons where you compare the Greek word to the English word. And these resources will be helpful going forward as we begin the Iliad and read the Odyssey.