Antonis K. Petrides. Aeschylus in the mix: the making of Nikos Kazantzakis’Prometheus-Trilogy

8/19/2019 Antonis K. Petrides. Aeschylus in the mix: the making of Nikos Kazantzakis’Prometheus-Trilogy

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Aeschylus in the mix: the making of NikosKazantzakis’ Prometheus- TrilogyAntonis K. Petrides*

Kazantzakis’ two foundational works, Askitiki and the Odyssey, not only articulated the Cretan poet’s credo but also crystallized his attitude towards his (classical) forefathers. Kazantzakis mythologized his own writing as an overhaul of ancient myth(s), Western as well as Eastern, in search of a new philosophical synthesis. He treated the great literary figureheads of the Greek classical past (Homer, Aeschylus,etc.) as ‘ancestors’ not in the irredentist sense of his day but in the spirit of Askitiki: as stepping stones in a great + n–’ oro” (‘uphill course’) leading to the transubstantiation of spirit into flesh. This construct is projected back to the author,who is enmeshed in his own mythology — a ‘great athlete’ himself in the image and likeness of his heroes, especially Odysseus and Christ. Prometheus was no less important as a Kazantzakian alter ego than these two; in fact, he must be placed right next to them in terms of his symbolic prominence in the first two phases of Kazantzakis’ oeuvre. The Titan has an important role in the Odyssey and is given pride of place among the mythological themes treated in Kazantzakis’ Greek-style tragic drama. A close reading of ancient ‘Aeschylean’ material informed by German classical scholarship provided the immediate springboard for Kazantzakis’

reconceptualization of the Prometheus myth. However, the Prometheus trilogy is an eclectic space of multiple intersecting receptions — much more than a straightforward reaction to Aeschylus. Kazantzakis’ is an all-encompassing version of the ancient myth comprising elements not only from the Aeschylean but also fromthe Hesiodic, Platonic, and Ovidian accounts. Moreover, three centuries’ worth of European literary receptions of Prometheus, most evidently the versions by Goethe and Percy Shelley, as well as Kostas Varnalis’ twist in ‘The Burning Light’ (1922),also informed Kazantzakis’ perception of the Titan. And certainly Nietzsche, in whose theory of tragedy Prometheus looms large, left his indelible mark. Still, all

intertextual material in the trilogy is tweaked and twisted to fit Kazantzakis’ own central myth: the salvatio dei by the great, solitary desperado, whose ultimate prize is the Cretan Glance.

Aeschylus, Prometheus, Nikos Kazantzakis: Processes of Reception

Kazantzakis’ theatre and its fortunes

Kazantzakis’ Prometheus trilogy was written in – . At the time Kazantzakiswas living under a mild sort of house arrest in German-occupied Greece and spe-cically on the island of Aegina, while the Axis occupation of Greece was dwindling

*Correspondence: Undergraduate Programme ‘Studies in Hellenic Culture’, Open Univer-sity of Cyprus, P.O. Box , CY- , Nicosia, Cyprus. [email protected]

Classical Receptions Journal Vol . Iss. ( ) pp. –

The Author . Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For Permissions, please email: [email protected]: . /crj/clu

Classical Receptions Journal Advance Access published November 8, 2014

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and the rst signs of civil strife were becoming visible. The trilogy goes practicallyunmentioned in almost all scholarly accounts of the Prometheus myth and itsmodern reception. Still Kazantzakis’ three plays — Promhq" #a” Pur ’ 0ro” (Pro-metheus Lightbearer), D" smÞth” (Prometheus Bound), and Lu0m" no” (PrometheusUnbound) — constitute the most grand scale exploitation of the myth sinceShelley’s. It is also the sole modern attempt theatrically to recreate (and of courseto resignify) the complete Aeschylean trilogy (Kazantzakis entertained no doubtsabout the authorship of the plays), of which only the rst play, Prometheus Vinctus,is extant.

The fact that scholars and theatre practitioners largely ignore the Prometheustrilogy is, of course, consistent with the overall neglect of Kazantzakis’ theatreboth in Greece and abroad. Despite the fact that it was as a playwright thatKazantzakis rst made a name for himself in the early s, performances of his

plays in Greece were few and far between during his lifetime. They multiplied afterthe -edition of his collective theatrical works (actually, his tragedies, since theprose plays of his youth were not included in that edition), which appeared in theapogee of Kazantzakis’ international fame. They increased even more in numberfollowing his death in . Nonetheless, Kazantzakis never truly took to thegeneral taste. Outside of Greece, Kazantzakis the playwright remains practicallyunknown. Merely a handful of his plays have been translated in any foreign

Bien ( ) brings the trilogy in close association with these crucial historical circum-stances and provides an engaging political interpretation of it.

On the modern reception of Prometheus, see mainly: Awad ( ), Kerényi ( ),Trousson ( ), Raizis ( ), Duchemin ( ), Podlecki ( : – ), Dougherty( ), Theisohn ( ), Ruffell ( : – ). The myth’s reception in ModernGreece, absent from all the above, is sketched out in Yatromanolakis ( ).

Throughout this article, I shall be using the established Latin titles of Aeschylus’ plays toavoid confusion with the titles of Kazantzakis.

The fundamental work of reference for Kazantzakis’ theatre is Petrakou ( ); see also,

Petrakou ( ) and ( ). General surveys of Kazantzakis’ theatre also include Anton( ) on Kazantzakis and the notion of the tragic; Bien ( ), which offers an analysisof all Kazantzakis’ plays from the perspective of the playwright’s involvement in theideological movements of his times; and Beaton ( : – ). Papahatzaki–Katsaraki( ) is also useful as a compendium of information.

On Kazantzakis’ early theatrical output see Petrakou ( : – ), Puchner ( ). In , Kazantzakis won the International Peace Award. In , he lost the Nobel Prizein literature to Albert Camus (an admirer of his theatre as much as his prose) by a verynarrow margin.

Petrakou ( ) passim collects the most important performances of each individualKazantzakian play. The most monumental production of Kazantzakis in Greece wasNational Theatre’s Buddha directed by Alexis Solomos (details of the production,including photographs, can be found at NT’s online archive at < http://www.nt-archive.gr/playDetails. aspx?playID= >).

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language, and fewer still have seen the light of theatrical day. Regarding thePrometheus trilogy in particular, to the best of my knowledge only the rst twoinstalments have ever been ofcially translated — in Spanish by Miguel CastilloDidier ( ) — although Kazantzakis himself seems to have rendered PromitheasPyrforos most probably in French.

The reasons for this neglect are manifold, but three main facts, all of whichdescribe the sprawling Prometheus trilogy as much as most of Kazantzakis’ theatricalproduction, explain to a certain extent why his dramas could be perceived as un-appealing and unmarketable to wide audiences (Greek or international). In hismature period, Kazantzakis quite consciously produced works which were out of touch with the avant-garde of his day both in terms of theatrical and of poeticmedium: namely, Greek-style verse dramas (indeed tragedies, with one notableexception), in high-own, cherché and ‘owery’ demotic, generally felt to be

obsolete, redolent of nineteenth-century romanticism. Furthermore, the heavyphilosophical burden that Kazantzakis piles mercilessly upon plot and charactertransforms the plays into transparent reections of the author’s philosophicalbeliefs, but all the same it makes them ponderous and unwieldy vehicles of theat-ricality, obscure for audiences and troupes alike. Finally, despite the author’sinsistence to the contrary, the impression lingers that Kazantzakis wrote in factcloset dramas: the Prometheus trilogy, for one, for all its spectacular scenery, im-pressive sound and visual effects and obvious attention to performability (there is

nothing in the plays that could not be rendered, technically speaking), may indeed

The most widely translated among Kazantzakis’ plays are Buddha (French, German,English, Spanish), Christopher Columbus (French, English, Spanish), Comedy: A Tragedyin One Act (English, French, German), Melissa (French, English), KonstantinosPalaiologos (German, Spanish, Catalan), Kouros (French, English), and Sodom and Gomorrah (English, Catalan). Excerpts from Christ (Spanish) and Odysseas (English)also circulated. For a complete catalogue of Kazantzakis’ works translated in foreign

languages, see the two catalogues in the website of Helen Kazantzakis Press [PatroklosStavrou]: ( ) ; ( )< http://www.kazantzakispublications.org/news/ _CURRENTTR .pdf >.

For Kazantzakis’ theatrical fortunes, especially in the United States, see Friar ( ). The information in Letter to Pandelis Prevelakis, dated February , is ratherambiguous: ‘I have translated, aside from Melissa and Julian, also Odysseas and the rstPrometheus, but I don’t know where the second and third Prometheuses are. I had left avalise full of manuscripts with Tea [Anemoyiannis], but it’s not there. I am worried,because I don’t have a copy and I no longer know what they say’ (tr. Bien : ).

The exception is the meta-theatrical Othello Returns. On Kazantzakis’ language in the context of his times, see Bien ( ). On Kazantzakis and romanticism, see Leontaritou ( ), Bien ( : ix–xv). Cf. Petrakou ( : ): ‘Prometheus is one of those plays by Kazantzakis which over-awed theatre groups prefer to keep at arm’s length’.

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be too laggard and repetitive, too drawn out and rhetorical — in one word, toograndiose — for the modern stage.

Reception as overhaul: mythologizing author and oeuvre

That said, although, curiously, only seldom has this been the venue of choice forproducing Kazantzakis, it seems that the kind of stately, grandiloquent, larger-than-life theatre that Kazantzakis developed would be ideally t for the open-airauditorium, whose popularity rapidly increased in the heyday of his playwritingcareer. Because, all possible shortcomings aside, Kazantzakis’ statuesque, archetypaldramas constitute, if not always the most artistically accomplished, still the mostambitious and holistic theatrical appropriation of ancient tragedy Modern Greektheatre has ever seen. Kazantzakis’ tragedies formed an organic part of a daringartistic vision, in which the playwright himself was heavily invested. Being yetanother expressive vehicle for his idiosyncratic, all-encompassing credo,Kazantzakis’ Greek-style theatre embraced, superseded and often consciously sub-verted Greek tragedy in the same way that his Odyssey challenged Homeric epic. Italso implicated the author himself, or at least a mythologized persona of his , whichhe projected upon everything he ever wrote (from his published works to his privatecorrespondence and his journals), in a grand game of mythic identities, travellingfrom author to work and vice versa.

Kazantzakis’ poetic oeuvre pursued a complete overhaul of Greek antiquity, es-

pecially epic and tragedy, antiquity’s most signicant literary genres fromKazantzakis’ viewpoint. In the purview of this daring project, his essential opusvitae, the new Odyssey ( ), was supposed to be not simply a ‘modern sequel’to the ancient work, but a complete revamp of, simultaneously, Homer, the epicgenre and Odysseus as a literary symbol for twentieth-century audiences. Likewise, Akritas , another poetic behemoth of , -syllable verses, which Kazantzakisdesigned concurrently with the Prometheus trilogy but never actually composed, wasmeant to recast the Byzantine and post-Byzantine demotic tradition. In the samevein and for similar artistic and philosophical purposes, Kazantzakis’ Greek-styletheatre, most of which was written alongside his great novels in the nal (post-World-War-II) period of his career, laid claim to the ancient tradition of the stage,its narratives and its voices. This wholesale appropriation of Greek antiquity was forKazantzakis something much more than a simple reworking of ancient myths andtexts by Homer, Aeschylus, or others. It was a means to an end: the pursuit of a newgrand narrative to supplement the moribund culture of the West. This, toKazantzakis’ mind, was not only urgently needed but also blessedly feasible in a

Alexis Solomos’ Melissa was staged at the Herodes Atticus Odeon in Athens in . – . . . Buddha of the same director saw two series of performances in the same venue

( – . . , – . . ).


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period of history which, at the behest of Oswald Spengler, he regarded as transi-tional and uid, hence formative and full of creative potential:

The Chinese have a wonderful curse: ‘I curse you to be born in interesting times’. We havebeen aficted by this curse. It is our duty, to the best of our ability, with our struggle, with

the strength of our mind, with the pride of our soul, to turn this curse into a blessing. We livein cosmogonic times, and for that matter not in cosmogonic years, but in cosmogonic weeks,days and hours. Truly, every moment weighs as much as a century. Whoever lives for tenyears in these modern times turns into an ancient man. Time has acquired an unexpected,invaluable worth.

Kazantzakis rst comes across Oswald Spengler and his Der Untergang des Abendlandes in the boiling Berlin of , around the same crucial time that hefamiliarizes himself with Karl Marx and that the kernel idea of a Prometheus trilogystarts fermenting in his mind alongside the ripening of Askitiki and the new Odyssey.The latter two works were eventually published in and , respectively,though Askitiki was revisited and nalized in , concurrently withKazantzakis’ writing the Prometheus plays. The Prometheus trilogy, in otherwords, although written in the nal stage of Kazantzakis’ career, stems right fromthe heart of his most foundational period. Not accidentally, it is also the work thatmost closely resembles Askitiki and the Odyssey in structure and spirit.

By careful and eclectic amalgamation over the years of a host of disparate elements

(mythical, religious, philosophical, even linguistic) and inuences (Nietzsche,Bergson, James, Marx, Lenin, Spengler, Orthodox mysticism, Buddhism, etc.)Kazantzakis attempted to lay the philosophical foundation of an ideated new reality:a synthesis and simultaneously a supersession of East and West, of ‘Greek’ Apolloand ‘Afro-Asiatic’ Dionysus. This ‘New Dionysus’ is incarnated in Kazantzakis’Odyssey by the gure of the great Motherth ( L anag8”), the oriental sage that mo-tivates the crucial discussion about the respective advantages of Greek and orientalcultures in Book . ff.

Though variously labelled (‘metacommunism’, ‘heroic pessimism’, etc.),Kazantzakis’ credo is chiey encapsulated by one powerful symbol, the CretanGlance. Interestingly, Kazantzakis considered the Cretan Glance as the key forunlocking both his work and his life, to the extent that his spiritual autobiography,

On Kazantzakis and Spengler, see Prevelakis ( : – ); Bien ( : – ); andespecially Lea ( : – ).

Letter to Stamos Diamantaras dated (E. Kazantzakis : ).

In the same spirit in which Kazantzakis’ philosophy, myths, and symbols constituted anamalgamation of Western, Judeo-Christian, African, Asian, and Greek elements, hislanguage, too, attempted to showcase the entire spectrum of the demotic in its rarest,most localized expressions. On Kazantzakis and language, see e.g. Bien ( ).

On the Cretan Glance, see mostly Levitt ( ), Anton ( ).


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Report to Greco, concludes with a chapter dedicated to the notion ( – ).For tacitly but distinctly, Kazantzakis’ new grand narrative also implied a role(a constructed identity, a mythical persona) for the author himself, who poses ac-cordingly, not as a mere artist, not as an agent outside the discursive space he hascreated, but as a shareholder in a quest. Throughout his personal correspondenceand other ‘private’ writings, as well as in the way he appears to perceive his daily lifeand work routines, it is clear that Kazantzakis constructs a continuity betweenhimself and his oeuvre: a mythical self-image of the author as a ‘great athlete’ andan ascetic in the image and likeness of his heroes. As he notes, time and again in hisletters, Kazantzakis regards his writing project as an upward drive, in which salva-tion is tantamount to the completion of the work — an elusive prospect, as thesummits are shifting constantly and the struggle is perennially renewed on theauthorial just as on the philosophical level (cf. Askitiki, , quoted below in this

article). The supersession of the generations of old is an inalienable part of what in Askitiki is called ‘The March’ (JH Por " 0 a), a four-step process leading to a gradualexpansion of consciousness from the Self ( S 1 *EgÞ ) to the Race (JH &R 0 tsa , whichincludes all ancestors and forerunners), and nally to the whole of Mankind ( JH + nqrwp0 thta ) and the Universe ( JH G 8”), as a prerequisite of the salvatio dei . TheMarch determines both the philosophical course of Kazantzakis’ heroes and his ownperception of his work as personal accomplishment, i.e. ‘salvation’.

Aeschylus belonged to a privileged quartet of ancient Greek writers whom

Kazantzakis emulated, not only by way of mimesis but also of translation (thethree other members of the group were Pindar, Thucydides and, of course, theonly one he ever managed actually to translate, Homer). Every bit in the spirit of Askitiki and the Odyssey, and in the same way that El Greco as ‘grandfather’ receiveshis descendant’s nal report (Kazantzakis’ ctional autobiography, published in

, was titled Report to Greco), Homer, Pindar, Thucydides, and Aeschylus,too, are ‘ancestors’ not in the irredentist sense of the day, which preached thecontinuity of ancient and modern Greece, but in the particular meaning ascribedby Kazantzakis to the succession of generations throughout his oeuvre: the ancestorsare steps to be trodden upon, spirits to be subsumed, in order to facilitate the greatmarch upwards. The perennial progression of sons surpassing their fathers eventu-ally leads beyond the decline of the old West. In Kazantzakis, a son’s purpose is to

Askitiki, – . Letter to Johannes Th. Kakrides, dated September , as the two were about to

begin the translation of Homer’s Odyssey: ‘I’d like us to do Pindar and Thucydidestogether as well, but life is short, alas, and the human being settles into the soil stillloaded with possibilities and desires’ (transl. Bien : ). In his early years,Kazantzakis had also translated seven minor Platonic dialogues, most probably by com-mission: see Stamatiou ( : – ).


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overcome his progenitors, and a father’s duty is to hope for this to happen, cf.Promitheas Desmotis, p. :

WJEAMI DE S : S 0 " *lp 0 z" i” p1 sto N 2n" #lpidou t 1 gkr " #mno;P Q OLG EA S : JH g8” n1 k0 m" i 3gi1 kal 0 t " r 0 mou!

OKEANIDES: What are you hoping for on the steep verge of hopelessness?PROMETHEUS: For Earth to beget a son who is better than I am!

In this pattern, the modern author, too, is an irreverent successor, a Prometheanson indeed, to the great poets of yore whom he takes over; the latter are ‘the gods andthe Titans’, upon which his soul is supposed ‘to step fearlessly’, in order to climb(Promitheas Desmotis, ):

S it 0 n" ” ka1 q" o0 , t 1 skalop 0 tiap0 ta , yuc– mou, 2 n" #’ oba ki 2 n" #bakratÞnta” t 1n 3gi0 sou st 1n 2gk0 lh .

Titans and gods, these are the steps of the ladder. Tread fearlessly on them, oh soul of mine,and climb, holding your son in your arms.

The supersession happens by way rst of assimilating and then of recasting theancient model’s dening traits. The following statement by Alexis Solomos, a vi-

sionary theatre man, who took centre stage in an ultimately abortive attempt toestablish Kazantzakis on the modern stage, is rare in its intimate understandingof Kazantzakis’ project of ancient reception:

Of all Modern Greek playwrights, Kazantzakis is the most Aeschylean. A Titan in the way heembraces the material, a Giant in the way he spreads out the plot, a Cyclops in how he carvesevery single phrase, pays no attention to the common ways, creates, envisions, prophesizes. If,in the three decades he worked on his plays, Modern Greek theatre was not hang up on2qogra ’ 0 a [the naturalistic depiction of conditions, situations and characters mainly fromthe Greek countryside] and farce, Kazantzakis would have proved to be the real father of ourdramatic literature, or, more accurately, its primordial creative deity’ (the emphases aremine).

I submit that these similarities in exalted language and style, in epic design,macroscopic outlook, and universal vision, which in Alexis Solomos’ mind broughtKazantzakis and Aeschylus together, are neither fortuitous nor circumstantial, but

Cf. also Kazantzakis’ Odyssey,

. – . Apart from Buddha (see n. ) and Melissa (see n. and < http://www.nt-archive.gr/playDetails.aspx?playID= >), Alexis Solomos also directed Kapodistrias in (see ).

Quoted by Petrakou ( ) on her book’s back cover.


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the result of deliberate self-fashioning, part and parcel of that aforementioned grandnarrative that motivates Kazantzakis’ ancient receptions and moulds the self-imageof both the playwright and his ctional projections. Aeschylus and Homer wereimportant in Kazantzakis’ ‘scheme of things’ not simply as model authors but also asa synecdoche of their genres and their worlds: the condensation of an idea thatneeded to be reformulated and recast by way of mimesis.

Kazantzakis mythologizes his own life and self, and inscribes the resulting image asa hermeneutic layer both unto his autobiography and across the board in his writtenword. In Kazantzakis, author and oeuvre are incorporated into a wider philosophy of succession as a means of achieving the necessary new synthesis. Therefore, nothingshort of a mythic discourse, radiating from the author’s wider Weltanschauung, de-termines the relationship between ‘target author/text’ and ‘receiver’, in our casebetween Aeschylus and Kazantzakis. The forefathers always loom large in

Kazantzakis: this is, of course, not so much a Bloomian/Freudian ‘anxiety of inu-ence’ as a Spenglerian and Nietzschean understanding of progress as a course fromwhat is old and exhausted to what is irreverently and aggressively vibrant and new.

‘Bodyguards of the Odyssey’: identifying Author and Hero

In order to understand the dynamics of Kazantzakis’ reception of Prometheus as amythical gure, we need to establish that in the Cretan poet’s work a similar mythicdiscourse, a comparable imaginary continuity, or union, binds the author not only to

his oeuvre at large but also to his heroes: Kazantzakis’ own self-perception is en-meshed not merely in his myth in general, but also in his mythical characters inparticular, to the extent that, as the Report to Greco clearly shows, the author himself is ultimately transformed into one of those ctional characters. Just like Prometheusand Heracles at the end of the Prometheus trilogy, in Kazantzakis’ mythical self-perception, author, work and hero merge into one: a new Odysseus of many guises,set upon a journey of salvation.

This journey aims at nothing short of the salvation of God. It is determined by asolipsistic, proto-existentialist agony, which encompasses, indeed titanically, thefate of the universe and all living things. This is what Kazantzakis terms + n–’ oro”,an ‘uphill course’, in which both author and ctional protagonist are implicated inequal measure and at the same time. Kazantzakis’ ‘athlete’ takes personally uponhimself the fate of the universe and its ‘struggling essence’ ( kint" 0ousa o2s0 a). In Askitiki, heart (J ardi 0 ) and mind (M oN ”) of the Salvator Dei, initially at odds andnally united in hope-free (‘ 2 n" #lpido”’) realization and understanding, are

On the particular importance of Nietzsche for the composition of Kazantzakis’

Prometheus trilogy, see the relevant section below. Similarly, in Odyssey Book , on the third day of his ascesis on the mountain, Odysseusdreams that his heart and mind quarrel like a man and a woman. The feminine element,the heart, wants to break off all shackles and plunge headlong into the abyss of God. Butthe masculine element, the mind, sets boundaries of law and order and reins the heart in.


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simultaneously the warriors and the battleeld in the universe’s everlasting upwarddrive for salvation. In various stages of his life, Kazantzakis attempted to materializethis philosophical construct in several forms of action, since action, political orother, remained for him to the end ‘the ultimate, most sacred form of theory’.To his chagrin, the only expressions of his vision he ever managed to give materialform to were works of art. Still, for Kazantzakis, running a mining business inPrastova, Mani, with Georgios Zorbas, herding Greek refugees from the EuxineSea back to the fatherland, launching an abortive political career, designing a newreligion with Angelos Sikelianos, travelling around the USSR with Panait Istrati,and writing an epic, a tragedy or a novel were homologous manifestations of thesame internal struggle.

In Kazantzakis, author and heroes share a mask, the L oni0 ”. This strangeKazantzakian hybrid, which binds the ever-struggling, ever-ascending desperado

with Nietzsche’s U ¨ bermensch, is regarded as the purest illustration of the humanphenomenon, a gure of a thousand ancient and modern faces, which change and yetalways remain the same: Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Moses, Nietzsche, Lenin,Alexander the Great, Psycharis, Genghis Khan, Dante, Shakespeare, etc. These‘great souls’ and ‘frontrunners’ ( mprost 0 roi) of humanity — all of whom, with theexception of Don Quixote, are historical, not mythical or literary personages (whichexplains why the great archetypes of myth are absent from the assortment) — are thededicatees of Kazantzakis’ S " rts 0 n" ” (Cantos) ; but above all they are dubbed the‘bodyguards’ (swmato’ 0 lak " ”) or ‘satellites’ (doru’ 0roi) of his Odyssey : they arethe intellectual companions ( s 0ntro ’ oi) of the new Odysseus, ses semblambles, ses frè res. As Kazantzakis’ deep preoccupation with ritual, and especially African, the-atre, taught him, masks are not so much means of concealment as of revelation: theydisclose possibilities for the Self to emerge clean from the dark depths of eshlyexistence; they materialize the Self’s ideal state, in which, to recall Kazantzakis’mantra, esh (matter) has been rened and ultimately transubstantiated into spirit.In this shared mythology of author and hero, such idealizations are summits, as itwere, in the anephoric course, whose function is twofold and paradoxical: the great

Askitiki, . On Kazantzakis’ fascination with (literal and metaphorical masks), which ‘can be equatedwith myths’, see Bloch ( – ), esp. : ‘Archetypal images haunt his ction andpoetry throughout which they recur under the guise of the Magna Mater, the InimicalBrothers (such as Jesus and Judas or Christian and Lucifer), Adonis, the dismemberedCorn God, the Magdalene, and the Sacricial Lamb [ . . . ] In a letter to a friend hecondes that these masks or myths are really projections: ‘‘For anyone who creates, allthese saintly or diabolical Gestalten are but pawns for the Supreme Game’’ ’ (my

emphasis). See Prevelakis ( : – ). Cf. Vrettakos ( ): ‘He saw in all these gures the peaks of human stature, and hesaw in their work the supreme achievement of the human phenomenon in itsuniversality’.


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athlete is supposed tirelessly to strive towards them, only to leave them rmlybehind, however, and move on, as soon as he reaches them. The masks areindeed transformational incentives that motivate and orientate the Uphill Course(+ n–’ oro”).

Time and again, this discourse percolates through the porous boundary thatdivides the ctional work from the ‘real’ life of the author. This is how HelenKazantzakis recalls her rst conversation with her husband:

Create an image of yourself, as you would like yourself to be, and try hard to be like thatimage, he advised me on the rst day we met. This was an idea nearly all of his charactersobsessed over and which he himself had followed.

‘We are Prometheus and at the same time Prometheus’ eagle’

Although not given the honour of a Canto, because, as said, Kazantzakis preferredhis ‘bodyguards’ to be historical (or legendary) individuals rather than gures of myth, Prometheus undoubtedly partakes in this discourse of masks and modelselves. The most explicit statement to that effect comes from the Prometheus trilogyitself, namely from Promitheas Desmotis ( ). Prometheus, himself a Titan, strivesfor a greater, purer version of his own being:

S 1n pi1 m" g0 lo 2 t 0” mou Promhq" #ap" r– ’ ano t1n e !plasa , 7 pw” q" #lw ,ki 3rm0 " i mprost 0 ki " *g1 2 klouq8 moctÞnta”7 so mpor8 n1 toN 2 klouq8 t 1 2 cn0 riaqa 1rq" i kair 1” n1 g0 noum" " 2 na o3 du0 ma”!

I myself have created the greatest Prometheus, proud, as I want him. He rushes forward andI strive to keep on, as much as I could possibly follow on his footsteps. Time will come for thetwo of us to become one!

Adèle Bloch ( – : ), in reference not to the Prometheus trilogy but toKazantzakis’ novel Toda-Raba, ascribes to the Prometheus model the propermixture of Freudian and Spenglerian, Messianic and Leninist, Nietszchean andBergsonian — in one word, Odyssean — ingredients that the trilogy’sPrometheus displays:

On a more general plane, the ‘Father’ may represent an antiquated authoritarian order, assupplanted by the Promethean son, a hero who brings revolutionary freedom for the hungryand enslaved people (see Toda Raba ). He is the Messiah who opens the doors to

E. Kazantzakis ( : ). Prometheus is implicitly identied with the heroes of Toda-Raba in the way they specifylove as motivation of their struggle. In Promitheas Desmotis, , the Okeanides try tounderstand what pushed Prometheus to clash with Zeus almighty. Prometheus’ answer is


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internationalism and supersedes the narrow connes of provincialism, since the spirit canmove on a broadening as well as a vertically ascending axis. Death and destruction often areushered by his arrival, so as to make room for the newer order, which in turn will becomeobsolete and be overthrown according to Spenglerian doctrine (my emphasis).

It is this unsettling internal need for constant renewal that unpacks a point veryimportant for understanding the Prometheus trilogy. Kazantzakis made the point in a letter to Panait Istrati. In this letter, written in the crucial ‘gestation period’ of

the plays, Kazantzakis explicitly evokes Prometheus as a metaphor for his ownpersonal quest, identifying himself, critically, not just with Prometheus, butalso with Prometheus’ eagle:

We are happy the two of us, the only happy people in this world, because we play with reand have need of nothing but our magnicent, voracious, blood-lled hearts. We will devourthose hearts each day and they will be born again each night; we are Prometheus and at the sametime Prometheus’s eagle — we are complete beings (my emphasis).

The unity of Titan and bird, tortured and torturer, is key in Kazantzakis’Prometheus plays: it is this exact unity, this unrelenting urge to be constantly startingafresh, relentlessly striving for a peak that is constantly shifting (not in the absurdistmanner of Camus’ Sisyphus, but in the Bergsonian logic of an endlessly-driving é lanvital ) and nding within oneself the power never to settle in victory or surrender indefeat, which secures the salvatio dei : the transubstantiation of esh into spirit. Atthe beginning of Promitheas Desmotis ( ff.), prior to his being chained to the rock,Prometheus awaits the arrival of the bird of prey not with apprehension, but in astate of ecstatic expectation matched only by Epimetheus’ nasty pleasure for hisbrother’s coming torture (which he stupidly believes he has expedited with hiscomical attempts to summon the bird). Prometheus is thankful that Fate has keptthe eagle at bay long enough for him to teach mankind all the arts, that is, tocomplete his earthly duty. But now the time has come for the eagle to swoopdown and ‘conclude the salvation’. In a stark reversal of the traditional myth,

this: P Q OL : + p’ t 1n poll 1n 2 g0 ph! WJEAM : Sto 1” 2 nqrÞpou”; / P Q OL : + p’ t 1npoll 1 st 1n l" ut " ri 1 n 2 g0 ph (‘PR: Out of great love! OK: For humanity? PR: Out of great love for freedom’). Very similar are the Crane’s words in Toda-Raba (the Crane,notably, is a Cretan): ‘D" ;n pr" #p" i n’ 2 gwnizo0mast " gi1 t1n 2 nqrwp0 thta , m1 gi1 t1’ l 0ga to 0 th po 1 m" tamor ’ Þn" i s" ; ’ wti 1 t 1 3gr 1 4 c" ro, t 1 2 n–suco, t 1 4 qlio , po1kalo N m" + nqrwp0 thta !’ (‘We should not be struggling for mankind, but for this amethat transforms into re that humid, restless, wretched haulm we call Mankind’) ( Toda-

Raba,

). It is a shame that Bettina Knapp’s brilliant The Prometheus Syndrome (Knapp ),which studies the Prometheus myth as a repository of perceived qualities that patternedthe behaviour of various famous personalities, does not include a chapter on Kazantzakis.

Tr. Bien ( : ).


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Prometheus calls the eagle ‘his secret collaborator’ and orders him to descend (q" ;” d" ;q" #”, ‘whether you want it or not’):

S 1 spl 0 cna mou gi1 s " #na t0 1cw qr" #y" i,gi1 s " #na paraqr 0 s " yan, kat " #ba,

n1 ’ R”, na pi" 8 ”, ka1 n1 moN 2 no0 x" i” str 0 ta !

It is for you that I have grown my entrails, for your benet they have become so bold. Comedown, eat, drink and pave my way!

Later in the scene, in Prometheus’ response to Pandora’s fearful cries ( PromitheasDesmotis, ), the bird of prey has become ‘the bird of freedom’: the Titan’s suf-fering, freely chosen, is the culmination of his struggle; more than a physical ordealit is the spiritual exercise on which his + n–’ oro” hangs. Being chained to the rockand devoured by Zeus’ eagle is the apex of Prometheus’ ascent, of his struggle n1k0 n" i t1 s0 rka pn" #ma (to transubstantiate esh into spirit). Hence Prometheus hasappropriated the eagle. His brother’s foolish attempts to summon him in order tocause his brother pain misres. Prometheus summons the eagle himself, proudlyand with avid anticipation ( " *g1 q1 kat " b0 sw, m0 q" , t 1 5rnio / t 8” q" otiki R” 2rg 8”st 1n k" ’ al– mou, ‘Make no mistake, I shall be the one to summon the bird of divinewrath on my head’). The bird is his opposite, the agent of Zeus’ wrath, but in thishappy moment the opposites have been synthesized and the catharsis of sufferingmay begin. Similarly, in that fateful moment in Promitheas Lyomenos when Heraklesbreaks Prometheus’ bonds, the Titan rst hesitates to descend, and when he does,his rst act is to hug not Herakles, who waits with open arms, but the eagle, whom hecalls ‘my child’ (Promitheas Lyomenos , – ).

Just as much as the ‘bodyguards of the Odyssey’, therefore, perhaps even more so,Prometheus is for Kazantzakis the ultimate symbol of that felicitous blending of vehement Mind ( M oN ”) and blazing Heart ( J ardi 0 ), which drives man forwardrelentlessly and inspires him with the eagerness needed to full the ultimate, great-est task of life (‘t 1n pi1 tran 1 n1 x" t " l " #yw 2 g8 na’), that is, to look fearlessly into theabyss. This is the denition of the Cretan Glance. The quotation above is taken, notpurposelessly, from Kazantzakis’ Odyssey, Book . For it is the Odyssey thatclinches Prometheus’ primary signicance in Kazantzakis’ mythical thought andforeshadows the commanding precedence given to Prometheus among the Greekmythological themes treated in his theatre. Some ‘bodyguards of the Odyssey’recur in Kazantzakis’ tragedies (Buddha, Christ), but only Prometheus, and notsimply because of Aeschylus’ precedent, is given the privilege of a trilogy.

In Kazantzakis’ great epic the Titan, alongside Tantalus and Heracles, is singledout as one of Odysseus’ great forefathers, the three Great Fates ( L

o8

r"

”) that see the

Athlete from birth to the peaks of ascesis and nally to death. As such, Prometheus

The only other Greek myths that Kazantzakis turned into tragic theatre are the myths of Theseus and the Minotaur in Kouros, and, of course, of Odysseus in Odysseas.


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appears three times, in the most strategic locations of Kazantzakis’ Odyssey. First, inBook . – , the three Fates or ‘dragons’ bestow upon young Odysseus thequalities that will determine his life — to the sorrow of his father, who wanted tomake Odysseus a farmer just like himself, but to the utter delight of his grandfather,who dreamed of him as a pirate. Tantalus, the rst Fate, gives Odysseus an insatiableheart; Prometheus, the middle Fate ( 3 m" siak 1” moir0 rh”, . ), plants into himthe ‘seed of a great light’, a mind of vehement brilliance; and Heracles, the third,thrusting the little child into a blazing inferno that consumed looms, thrones andgods, i.e. all of earth’s vain hope in material values and false consolations, ‘bathedhim in the re of the spirit’s laborious struggle towards purication’. Odysseuslistens to this story as recounted by the palace’s chief minstrel ( tragoud 0 rconta” )during the feast organized in honour of his return to Ithaca. The story’s effect onhim is immense: immediately he feels ashamed and he curses himself for acquiescing

in the static, adventure-less life of a king, and decides to set himself upon a newjourney. Thus, Prometheus and the Fates are the indirect instigators of Odysseus’new voyage. These forefathers, the mythical hypostases of Heart, Mind, andStruggle, are not merely ancestral spirits: in their inseparable union, they are thetriune substance that constitutes Odysseus, as he sets upon his new and nal quest.

The three great Fates approach Odysseus once again, even more momentouslynow, at the time of his great ascesis in Book (the Odyssey’smost direct ‘illustrationof Askitiki ’). Prometheus’ role is even more distinguished and pronounced here,physically separated as it is, narratively speaking, from the role of the other twoFates. The sequence of the Fates’ visits is changed in Book , with Prometheus nowappearing last. Changed is also the content of the message, which is no longer one of love and hope addressed to a new-born child, but one of urgency and even accus-ation directed at an ascetic at the most crucial stage of his spiritual exercise. Tantalusand Heracles appear rst and second, to awaken in Odysseus the need to move fromEgo to Race (the second Skalop 0 ti , Stepping Stone, prescribed by Askitiki ). Butthe most important visit is the third and last one, Prometheus’ ( . ff.). In Book

, Prometheus is no longer, as Odysseus still wants to see him, the Master Mind

(k0 rh” to N noN , . ) who gave hope to humanity, but the ‘struggling substance’chained to the rock, betrayed by men and bewailing his failure to complete ‘life’smost glorious task’. Neither has Prometheus made peace with ‘the lawless god’ norhas he killed him; hence he is hanging in the balance between heaven and earth. The‘ultimate axe gleaming with dark blood’, that is, the struggle’s greatest and ultimatetask, lies beyond life and death. This is where Odysseus should head. At that verymoment, a terrible cry for help rises from the rocks. It is as if armies of men aremarching up the slope. This is the great bellow of mankind struggling for salvation.

Odysseus must heed that cry and embrace it as his own. Thus, the encounter with Friar ( : ). See Bien ( : – ). Askitiki , – .


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Prometheus causes the great athlete to take the third step upwards, to move fromRace to Mankind ( Askitiki’s third Stepping Stone) embracing the common strug-gle of Man to save God. The fourth and nal step, embracing the whole universe,animate, and inanimate beings alike, will come soon after at the instigation of Mother Earth.

Prometheus was there in Odysseus’ birth, there, too, in his ascetic maturation.The cycle cannot be completed unless he is also present at the time of the Archer’sdeath. The three Fates appear one last time in Book . – , to accompanyOdysseus to his last journey on the ‘death-ship’ ( carok 0 rabo ). The three fates arrivelast, after all of Odysseus’ friends have already gathered around him from the fourcorners of the earth. The Fates settle on the death-ship as its three central masts(the symbolism is obvious) and the women adorn them with fruit. This fruit is thelast thing Odysseus will touch before everything disappears and his mind frees itself

from the ‘last cage’, freedom itself.Avenues to prometheus, I : immediate contexts

If Odysseus, then, is the ultimate Kazantzakian mask and the most consummatemythic metaphor of Kazantzakis’ credo, Prometheus is undoubtedly the gureclosest in signicance. Kazantzakis invested in Prometheus as much as he didonly in Odysseus and Christ otherwise.

Numerous avenues, beyond the Aeschylean plays, led Kazantzakis to the Titan,some of which were literary, stemming from major landmarks of Greek and

European literature, and others more incidental phenomena of the culturalZeitgeist , for instance, Galateia Kazantzakis’s translation of Aeschylus’Prometheus Vinctus and even more importantly, the Delphic Festivals of EvaPalmer and Angelos Sikelianos, which introduced Aeschylus’ play to a wide audi-ence as the rst Greek tragedy ever to be staged in an ancient open-air auditorium inGreece in front of a mass audience of connoisseurs and common folk alike ( ,

). Bolstered by such surge in its cultural prominence in Greece and abroad,Prometheus Vinctus was obviously Kazantzakis’ prime interlocutor in the trilogy . Buteven this intertextual exchange, it must be emphasized, was actually mediated by thephilological tradition, mainly by German classical scholarship, of the nineteenthcentury.

Askitiki, – . Of course, one cannot exclude the possibility that he could already be familiar withproductions of Greek tragedy in open-air theatres that pre-date those in Delphi — forinstance in Orange, Syracuse, and in many other venues around the Mediterranean.

On the performances, as well as Eva Palmer’s perception of Aeschylus and Greek theatre,

see Van Steen ( ); cf. also Sideris ( :

– ). Kazantzakis’ reaction toSikelianos’ Delphic project was cold and distant overall (see e.g. Letter to PandelisPrevelakis, in Prevelakis : – ). He did not attend the performances, and the hypesurrounding them caused him feelings of despair for what he thought was Sikelianoswasting his talent.


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The intertextual landscape of the Prometheus trilogy is a complex space of mul-tiple intersecting receptions. Aeschylus is obviously the chief pr 0gono” (‘ancestor’)whom the modern author, the Promethean son, attempts to supersede, as argued inPart . Yet, the Prometheus trilogy is an eclectic conception, much more than astraightforward reaction to Aeschylus. Kazantzakis’ is an all-encompassing versionof the ancient myth comprising elements, apart from the Aeschylean, also from theHesiodic, Platonic, and Ovidian accounts. Moreover, three centuries’ worth of European literary receptions of Prometheus, most evidently the versions by Goetheand Percy Shelley, who turned Prometheus towards a kind of romantic heroism thatalways appealed to the Cretan playwright, as well as Kostas Varnalis’ twist on themyth in The Burning Light ( ), also informed Kazantzakis’ perception of theTitan. And certainly Nietzsche, in whose theory of tragedy Prometheus looms large,left his indelible mark. Still, and this must be strongly emphasized, the most sig-

nicant formative pressures on Kazantzakis’ Prometheus remain decisivelyKazantzakian. All intertextual material in the trilogy is tweaked and twisted to tKazantzakis’ own central myth: the salvatio dei by the great, solitary desperado ,whose ultimate prize is the Cretan Glance, the uninching glimpse at, and ultim-ately the union with, the abyss. Other than the Odyssey itself, the Prometheus trilogyis conceivably the most holistic ‘illustration of Askitiki ’ one comes across inKazantzakis’ oeuvre. Likewise, Prometheus is the character most akin to Odysseus.

In the following three sections, which comprise Part of this paper, I explorewhat I term the ‘immediate contexts’ of Kazantzakis’ reception of the Prometheusmyth. First I turn to Askitiki, which , along with the Odyssey, is a prior framework forunderstanding any work of Kazantzakis. Then I anatomize Kazantzakis’ readings of Aeschylus, which were decisively determined by classical scholarship at large butespecially by the work of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, a leading classical scholar of the early nineteenth century, whose work on Aeschylus’ supposed Prometheus tril-ogy was seminal. Specic attention is given to the way Kazantzakis turns to satyrplay — the satyric element being a mythical preguration of é lan vital — in order toamalgamate the Aeschylean and the Kazantzakian components of the intertextual

mix into a new, unied whole .‘A commentary on Askitiki’

Taken into account that the idea of a Promethean play was being gestated for twentyyears and more, the Prometheus trilogy haunted Kazantzakis’ mind for almost as

On Prometheus in Hesiod, see Vernant ( : – ) and Beall ( ); and in Plato’sProtagoras ( d– d), Ferrarin ( ), with Edelstein ( ) for a wider emphasis on

the ancient Greek idea of progress, evoked by the Protagoras story among others. OnPrometheus as the creator of the human race from mud and rainwater (the story isrecounted, among others, by Ovid, Met. . ff.), see Guthrie ( ).

Letter to J. Th. Kakrides, dated July (Bien : ): ‘[The Prometheus trilogy]has been greatly tormenting me for a long time’.


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long as, perhaps even longer than, the Odyssey (designed and composed in successivedrafts between the years – ). Written in a six-week ash of inspiration veyears after the publication of the Odyssey, the trilogy falls in the third and nal phaseof Kazantzakis’ career: in the same year, , Kazantzakis completed the seconddraft of his rst major novel, Zorba the Greek ; but even more importantly, thetrilogy’s composition coincided with Kazantzakis’ revisiting and nalizing his philo-sophical Summa, Askitiki.

The importance of the Odyssey for the formation of the trilogy under examinationhere was implied above. Not only does the epic give Prometheus pride of place, butalso the Prometheus trilogy, much like the Odyssey, begins with an image of massacreand bloodshed and ends with the hero plunging into a nirvana-like state of non-existence. Above all, Kazantzakis’ magnum opus is naturally, among all of hiswritings, the most direct ‘commentary on and illustration of Askitiki ’. I argue

that the Prometheus trilogy is not far off in this respect. Evidence of the importanceof Askitiki for understanding numerous points of detail in the Prometheus plays isprovided throughout this article. However, as Thomas King rst saw (King :

– ), the formative inuence of Kazantzakis’ philosophical credo on this par-ticular piece of work extends beyond its philosophical make-up to the deeper level of structure.

The Prometheus trilogy, like the Odyssey itself , is structured according to thegeneral design of Askitiki. King underlines the correspondence between especiallythe rst part of Askitiki, the Three Duties ( Askitiki , – ) and the three conictsPrometheus traverses before achieving his nal salvation. King shows that the ac-complishment of the rst duty of Askitiki (‘without futile protestations to recognizeand accept the boundaries of the human mind’), which involves the rst conict(the opposition of Prometheus’ and Zeus’ orders), coincides by and large with theplot of Promitheas Pyrforos. Dealing with a universe governed by Zeus’ laws and ironst, Prometheus, like the athlete of the Spiritual Exercises, comes to realize that hecannot achieve personal salvation unless he sets free all other living things by placingthe order of his own mind opposite that of Zeus:

The initial version of the Promethean conict in the trilogy [ . . . ] consists of an oppositionbetween God’s order and Prometheus’ order, and the ground of the conict is the same asthat of the rst duty — the mind and its will to impose order on the multitudinous andchaotic welter of phenomena. Prometheus, in the terms of the rst duty, is in conict withGod and the way things are; he is also working to free himself by opposing God and bymaking men free.

Letter to Stamos Diamantaras (Bien : – ).

Letter to Bö rje Knö s ( ): ‘I’m very happy that you’ve begun to translate Askitiki. Asyou know, that work is the seed from which my entire work has sprouted. Whatever Ihave written is a commentary on and illustration of Askitiki’ (transl. Bien : – ).

Askitiki, . King ( : ).


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The second Askitiki duty, which involves the Heart breaking free of the world of phenomena and striving to merge with the invisible ‘struggling essence’ ( mac0m" nho2s0 a), corresponds, according to King, with the rst two acts of PromitheasDesmotis. Having imposed his own order on the world of the ve senses,Prometheus starts to move towards a more mystical experience, which will eventu-ally give rise to a Deliverer: a physical being identied with Heracles, product of thesexual union between a Peasant Girl ( V wri0 ta ) and a shadowy gure, part god, partbull, who nonetheless gives every appearance of being a spiritual force emanatingfrom Prometheus’ own struggling will — Prometheus’ son. The crucial moment of passage from the rst to the second duty, as well as to the second conict is, as Kingrecognizes correctly, the scene in which one of Prometheus’ children asks his fatherto teach him how to make a musical instrument out of a bull skull. Prometheus’creations, like their maker, are now more than mere creatures of the esh and look

beyond their sensory experience. The most signicant shift, however, concerns thevery nature of God, which undergoes a crucial transformation: Zeus is no longer anexternal opponent; it is exactly that internalized ‘struggling essence’, which awaitssalvation by way of the Athlete’s spiritual ascent ( + n–’ oro”).

The third duty, the repudiation of all the hopes and fears involved in the previoustwo — in fact, the last step before the achievement of true freedom — is accom-plished in the second half of Promitheas Desmotis. Prometheus, like Odysseus afterthe destruction of his ideal city, comes face to face with the shocking reality that hisstruggle cannot possibly result in any practical gain. However, instead of retreatingin panic, the struggling Titan acquires the ability to look at the abyss with anuninching eye. Prometheus falls into a trance-like state at the end of the secondplay of the trilogy:

When Prometheus Bound ends, then, Prometheus has done what the three duties require inorder to achieve freedom. Earlier he had adhered to the hopes of the mind and the heart, butat the end of this play, he has looked at Fate, he has said that he is a worker hanging in theabyss, he has realized that the third duty is to set his prow, without hope, calmly, toward theabyss and say, ‘Nothing exists!’ He is free.

Nikos Kazantzakis, classicist: Prometheus trilogy and (German) scholarship

Askitiki and the Odyssey may furnish the semantic framework of the plays, butnaturally Kazantzakis’ trilogy also bespeaks a very close and knowledgeable readingof Aeschylus — not only of Prometheus Vinctus, but also of the relevant informationconcerning the other three lost Promethean plays: Promhq" 1” Pur ’ 0ro”(Prometheus Ignifer) and Promhq" 1” Lu0m" no” (Prometheus Solutus), whichKazantzakis considered the rst and third instalments, respectively, of a connectedAeschylean trilogy. Signicantly, Kazantzakis also exploited the extant information

King ( : ).


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on the satyr play Promhq" 1” Purka " 0” (Prometheus, Fire-Kindler), whichAeschylus probably staged in BC along with his Persians. Insomuch as thesefragmentary vestiges of the ancient plays naturally depend on philological explica-tion to make sense, Kazantzakis’ Aeschylean readings, in a way that showcases hispainstaking thoroughness, are fundamentally informed by classical scholarship.Most decisive was the inuence of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, whose book onAeschylus’ supposed Prometheus trilogy (Welcker ) was procured forKazantzakis, upon his specic request, by Professor Johannes Kakrides, anotherleading classical scholar and Kazantzakis’ long-time collaborator. Kazantzakis hadalso requested von Lasaulx ( ), but the signs of that small book’s inuence(actually a -page pamphlet later incorporated into Lasaulx , – ) arescarce. It is mostly Welcker’s various contributions that percolate throughKazantzakis’ work.

First of all, Kazantzakis, like many others before and after him, follows theGerman philologist’s general theory regarding the sequence of the plays in theancient model: Welcker was the rst to suggest, not amidst general agreement,that Prometheus Ignifer, Vinctus, and Solutus formed a connected trilogy (of un-doubted Aeschylean authorship) in that order. A second piece of evidenceshows Kazantzakis reading Welcker in even more imaginative a fashion.Aeschylus fr. Radt (from Prometheus Solutus) mentions a custom related tothe captivity of Prometheus:

A 2 sc 0 lo”d1 " *n t ~ N luom" #nN Promhq" 8 sa ’ 8 ” ’ hsin 7 ti " *p1 timI to N Promhq" #w” t1n st " #’ anonp" rit 0 q" m" n tI k" ’ al I , 2 nt0 poina toN " *k" 0 nou d" smoN .

Aeschylus in his play Prometheus Unbound says clearly that it is in honour of Prometheus thatwe put the wreath around our head, as requital for his bondage.

Aeschylus’ reference was most probably made at the end of the trilogy in thecontext of an aetiological myth regarding the establishment of rites in honour of Prometheus. What is suggestive is that Kazantzakis eschews the tradition of thewreath, and instead picks up on Welcker’s suggestion that the custom demanded thecelebrants wear also, apart from the st " #’ ano”, a ring symbolizing Prometheus’bondage. In Promitheas Desmotis, Act III ( – ), Kazantzakis’ Athena putsjust such a ‘thick iron ring’ on Prometheus’ protesting nger, to signify theTitan’s and Zeus’ common subjection to the higher power of fate.

Beyond Welcker, the evidence indicates that Kazantzakis adhered to the teachingsof classical scholarship in general, most importantly in dening his trilogy’s dramatis

Letter to J. Th. Kakrides, dated

July

(Bien

:

). Bien’s note thatKazantzakis asked for Welcker’s Der epische Cyclus oder die homerischen Dichter is obvi-ously mistaken.

Welcker ( : ). Ibid., .


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personae. With the possible exception of Athena, Bacchus, and Pan, of whom there isno trace in the ancient fragments, as well as the archetypal, anonymous guresrepresenting mankind mostly in Promitheas Desmotis (a Young, a Mature and anOld Man, two choruses, one of men and one of women, + la ’ om0 ta , ‘the Doe-EyedGirl’, and of course the pivotal V wri0 ta , ‘Peasant Girl’), every single character inKazantzakis’ trilogy, despite any other afliations and afnities he or she may have,seems to have appeared in the four Promethean plays ascribed to Aeschylus.

We know very little of Prometheus Ignifer, but there are enough remains from thesatyr play Promhq" 1” Purka " 0” (Prometheus Fire-Kindler) to justify Kazantzakis’inclusion of a chorus of Pan 0poula (‘Pan’s children’, an obvious analogue of thesatyrs) and Silenus into his own Pyrforos. The same ancient fragment (fr. a Radt)also informs us that Promhq" 1” Purka " 0” featured parts for Epimetheus andPandora, as well, clearly reminiscent of Hesiod, Works and Days – .

The four Titans, who make a chorus-like appearance in Act I of Kazantzakis’Promitheas Lyomenos, seem to derive from the Cretan playwright’s research intoAeschylus’ homonymous play, at least if Casaubon’s conjecture is correct.Aeschylus’ Prometheus Solutus also featured Heracles as Prometheus’ liberator(frr. – Radt), whom Kazantzakis readily adopts. Finally, the fact that theancient hypothesis of Prometheus Vinctus wrongly lists Heracles and Earth ( G 8)among the characters of that play has long allowed the reasonable inference thatG 8 also comes from Prometheus Solutus . Mother Earth appears in Kazantzakis’Promitheas Pyrforos and Desmotis — and, in a rejuvenated version of herself, a blendof the original Earth character with Pandora and Choriata, in Promitheas Lyomenos.Thus, even this character, which Kazantzakis may otherwise have been thought toborrow from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound or Varnalis’ The Burning Light (althoughMother Earth’s role there is slightly different), is still to be found among the scat-tered ancient material.

The inuence of classical scholarship may be suspected also in the rejection of Okeanos from among the cast in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Vinctus. To be sure, thevoice of reconciliation and prudence, which is supposed to affront and disgust

Kazantzakis’ Prometheus, is divvied up to a variety of other, more patently objec-tionable or distracting gures (such as Epimetheus and Pandora) than the affable

Fr. a Radt: < A 2 sc 0 lo”> ’ hs 1n 7 ti Promhq " 1” t1n t8 n kak8 n p0 qon par1 t8 nSat 0rwn lab1 n ka1 paraq " #m" no” t~ N *Epimhq" 8 par–gg " il " m1 d" #xasqa0 ti par 1 Di0”,3 d" ; parako0sa” " *d" #xato t 1n PandÞran . 7 t " d" ; t1 kak1n e !sc " par 1 a3 t ~ N, t 0 t " " *n0hs " t 0 a2 t ~ N " *p" #m’ qh di1 toN to ka 1 *Epimhq" 0” (‘Aeschylus says that when Prometheusreceived the jar of evils from the Satyrs, he laid it in front of Epimetheus requestinghim not to accept anything from Zeus. But Epimetheus did not heed his request and

accepted Pandora. Only when that bane was by his side did he understand what had beensent to him; hence he is called ‘‘the man of afterthought’’ ’). Cf. also Theogony, – . Radt ( : ). Cf. Grifth ( : – ).


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Aeschylean Okeanos, but the strong dislike of classical scholarship for Aeschylus’personage, especially in the th and early th centuries, may also have motivatedKazantzakis’ choice.

Kazantzakis’ overall treatment of the PV material bespeaks a deep preoccupationwith and understanding of Aeschylus’ play. From PV Kazantzakis (in this casefollowing practically every other playwright who treated the myth) picks upHermes in his traditional part as Zeus’ despicable lackey. He also adopts thechorus of jWk" an0 d" ” (Okeanos’ daughters) and B 0 a (Violence) in roles very similarto the Aeschylean ones , while he infuses elements of Aeschylus’ Io into the characterof his Peasant Girl (V wri0 ta ). On the other hand, Kazantzakis substitutesAeschylus’ J r 0 to” (Power/Might) with um0” (Wrath) and omits Hephaestusaltogether. Both these choices are apt. Even amidst the worst pain and suffering,or perhaps especially then, Kazantzakis’ Zeus can hold no real power ( kr 0 to”) over

an Athlete who welcomes his passion as a condition sine qua non both for his ownsalvation and for God’s. As for Hephaestus, this weak, if honourable, Aeschyleangure with his qualms and compassion would be clearly offensive to theKazantzakian hero, who abhors the very idea of pity for the struggling ascetic.

Élan vital and satyr play

The beginning of Promitheas Pyrforos is characteristic of the way in which the pri-mary intertextual elements of the trilogy (Aeschylean and Kazantzakian) blend, tocreate a new, wholly original semantic space for the Prometheus myth inKazantzakis. The trilogy begins with the image of a primordial battleeld betweenthe powers of light and darkness. The annihilation of the human race is a decidedlynon-Aeschylean element, although it does make room for the Ovidian vision of Prometheus as Creator of Man. The speaker here is Pan ( Promitheas Pyrforos, ):

&Rag0 san t 1 boun1 ka1 gkr " mist8kan,cocl 0 zan t1 n" r 0 , ’ wti " ;” phdoN san,t 1 spl 0 cna 2 no8 xan toN " oN , ka1 ’ 0 nhgumn0 , ’ rict 1 t 1 pr 0swpo t 8” L o0 ra” .S 1 br0 co toN to 2 gkaliasm " #no”, qÞrount 1” ’ wt " r " ;” ka1 skot " in" ;” dun0 m" ”st 1n 4 busso 2 p1 p0 nw n1 pal " 0oun.

The mountains cracked and came crumpling d

Antonis K. Petrides. Aeschylus in the mix: the making of Nikos Kazantzakis’Prometheus-Trilogy

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