PROMETHEUS BOUND TRANSLATED BY ROBERT WHITELAW WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY J. CHURTON COLLINS, LITT.D. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS HARVARD HENRY FROWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH NEW YORK AND TORONTO PREFACE THE masterpieces of our national classics are now happily subjects of study wherever instruction in the humanities is given. There is probably no good school, public or private, in England in which a play of Shakespeare or a book of the Faerie Queene or of Paradise Lost is not included in the curriculum, and generally no doubt with the happiest results. In some cases such studies, degenerating into cram-work, may have failed to effect what it was hoped they would effect, but as a rule their record has certainly not been failure. An intelligent appreciation of good literature and a genuine interest in it have been created ; liberal curiosity has been awakened, and very many boys and girls annually leave our schools both fitted and anxious to extend their reading and explore for themselves the authors to whom they have been introduced. All this has been the result of the salutary reforms of the last fifteen or twenty years. Up to the present time the chief, and indeed in most schools the only, medium of literary as distinguished from linguistic teaching has been our own literature; and that our own literature should be the chief medium for such instruction is, for obvious reasons, both natural and desirable. But is it not equally desirable that the sphere of such instruction should now be extended, especially if it can be shown that by such an extension the students of our own and of modern literature generally would be gainers, and that such an extension would be practicable? Of this we may be quite sure, that a boy or girl who can be interested in a play of Shakespeare, will, if placed in a position to understand it, be equally interested in a judiciously selected play of one of the Attic masters, nay, would probably find more attraction in such epics as the Iliad and the Odyssey than in the Faerie Queene and in Paradise Lost. When we remember the educational value from a moral and sentimental point of view, the deep interest and attractiveness on the human and dramatic side, and above all the historical importance, in the fullest sense of the term, of the Greek masterpieces, can there be two opinions about the desirableness of including them in all our school courses of liberal studies? So essentially, indeed, does the influence of the mythology and poetry of ancient Greece penetrate our own classical literature, verse and prose alike, that a reader who has no ac quaintance with them is not only unable critically to understand either its evolution or its characteristics, but is perpetually at a loss to follow its commonest references and allusions. He is arrested at every step. No one, surely, could question that some acquaintance with that mythology and poetry is as indispensable to an intelligent study of our national classics from Chaucer to Tennyson, as the letters of the alphabet are to a written sentence. Of all intelligent literary study the basis must rest on some acquaintance with Greek tradition: turn where we will it confronts us; its presence, particularly in our poetry, is simply ubiquitous. And to say that at least an introduction to it should be regarded as part of the equipment of every decently educated boy and girl, even of the Board School or High School grade, is to say what probably few educationists would dispute. This information could be easily, as well as most pleasantly, imparted. The prescription of even a single Greek play or a book or two of Homer in translation would, with appropriate commentary by a competent teacher, go a long way towards supplying it. Even where the original is taught such translations, if prescribed as collateral studies, could scarcely fail to lighten and vivify the drudgery necessarily involved, |