Prometheus Bound (New York Review Books Classics)

by Aeschylus

The talk—but the commonplace word is hardly fitting—ranges over a wide spectrum of rhetorical modes: cunning sophistry, heartfelt appeal, sarcastic innuendo, brutal command, lyric chant, grandiose declamation, cryptic prophesy, reasoned analysis, defiant rebuttal, magical invocation, prayerful lament. And all these are modulations of a single poem, of which we cannot say that it is simply epic or dramatic, because at different times it is both.

Misfortune is a migrant bird that settles, now here, now there, on each of us in turn.

Words are physicians to a mind that’s sick with anger.

Let me assure you, I would not exchange my own misfortune for your slavery.