“Unbinding Prometheus”

Abstract

Rewriting is a mosaic of citations, that is, a new kind of writing grafted on an old one. From this vantage point, Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound filiates the sources of two Romantic poets, namely, Byron and Goethe. These traverse back history to Prometheus and the world of mythology. They identify themselves with the figure of Prometheus, who is a container of the foundational ideals of the Romantic vision of poetry and the poet. By the same token, the text becomes a place for the residual elements between traditional and contemporary communities. In this way, Lord Byron and Goethe appropriate and rework the mythical figure of Prometheus. “Unbinding  Prometheus” is an endeavour to examine the different treatments of the myth of Prometheus in two different texts by Byron and Goethe regarding Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound as a manifest text.