ABSTRACT
S.’s interest in the Prometheus myth, and its treatment by Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound, dates from at least as early as his first term at Oxford (Hogg Life i 70), but he doubtless knew the play from schooldays. S. had ordered an Aeschylus from Rickman in 1812 (L i 344), and was reading and translating the play with Byron in 1816 (Medwin i 268), from which period S.’s interest in writing a poem on the Prometheus theme may well originate (cp. Byron’s ‘Prometheus’ of July 1816). S. was also translating Prometheus Bound in July 1817 (Mary Jnl i 177). Mary famously recalled in 1823, when retracing the route taken through the Alps on their journey to Italy in March 1818, that S. had conceived the idea of his drama at that time while passing ‘la Montagne des Eschelles, whose dark high precipices towering above, gave S — the idea of his Prometheus’ (Mary L i 357). An entry in S.’s hand in Mary’s jnl for 26 March 1818 bears this out:
After dinner we ascended Les Echelles winding along a road cut thro perpendicular rocks of immense elevation by Charles Emmanuel Duke of Savoy in 1582. The rocks which cannot be less than 1000 feet in perpendicular height sometimes overhang the road on each side & almost shut out the sky. The scene is like that described in the Prometheus of Aeschylus — Vast rifts & caverns in the granite precipices — wintry mountains with ice & snow above — the loud sounds of unseen waters within the caverns, & walls of topling rocks only to be scaled as he describes, by the winged chariot of the Ocean Nymphs.
(Mary Jnl i 200) While it is certain that S.’s ideas for PU must have originated before this date, it is equally plain that S.’s specific conception of the first three acts owes a great deal to the Shelleys’ journey through the wintry Alps in March 1818, and their rapid transition to a warm Italian spring. This experience seems to have prompted a coalescence in S.’s imagination of many diverse literary, philosophical, political, scientific and personal influences, to produce a poem which, in the scale and quality of its achievement, goes far beyond anything S. had hitherto written. His thinking towards the project matured through the first Italian summer of 1818, as he busied himself with translations of Plato’s Symposium, Euripides’ Cyclops (see Longman ii 371–412, no. 172), various other classical translations, and much other reading connected with the conventional tourist sights and activities that the party were anticipating (e.g. Eustace, and Barthelemy; see notes below). At Bagni di Lucca from June to August, S. was also reading in various classical accounts of Greek life, perhaps with a view to an Introduction for his translation of the Symposium, the ‘Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Athenians’ (as SC vi 639 notes, the short essay ‘On Love’, also written around this time, may represent a false start on this essay). A note in Nbk 11 p. 4 (see headnote to no. 175), apparently derived from Herodotus, reads ‘Asia γυναικη Προμεθεως [i.e. “wife of Prometheus”]’; Herodotus is the only classical source for Asia as Prometheus’s wife (Histories iv 45), and Mary Jnl i 219–21 records S.’s systematic reading of Herodotus at Bagni di Lucca in July and August, suggesting that S. was by then engaged in detailed working out of the characters and action for PU. By the end of August, S. had definitely begun work in earnest on his drama.