PrometheusBoundIo.txt

Prometheus Bound
by Robert Lowell
Derived from Aeschylus (p.63-67)
Collected and Introduced by Stefan Rudnicki
The Actor's Book of Classical Monologues
Created on Dec 6, 2022

Character in the Play
======================
Io


Monologue
===========

The house of my father, Inachus, Prometheus... you
must know it, it's the best house in Euboea, and has the
largest heards. There, a little before now... no, 
long before... just before my mother's death... I was born,
another human lump, without shape or strength or the
heart to crawl. The fields came close to me then, and
cattle followed the fields, and the herdsmen seemed to
lean on the shoulders of the cattle. And when men and
animals changed places to look at me, I looked back at
them with their own dazed, absent-minded stare--ribs
rising and falling together, one soothing sound of tooth
and tongue and crunched stalk...

Then I learned to walk, and was allowed to follow the
cattle. I went out with them at sunrise, came home with
them at sunset. I could speak to the cattle. Later, I could
speak to the heardsmen. Later, I could speak to my
father...Animals, servants, and my father, their king--
they went on looking at me with the same look of corase,
indifferent kindness. I might have been a boy, or a
calf... Then one morning, I saw my father in a thundercloud--no,
not my father, but a face with splintered
black eyebrows, a heard of black rope, and a smile, obscene
and royal... the face of Zeus. Lightning flashed
at me from the cloud, like the wink of a man, and I knew
what the god desired. From then on, even in the clearest
weather, the cloud would stand above the fields, and
wait for me. My father's servants couldn't scare it from
the sky with their sticks. Then I began to scream at it.
I was led home, and shut in my room.

I was told the cloud still stood above the fields for days
and waited. Then at least, thundering and roaring and
whimpering to itself, it ran off like a wolf. That night, I
saw Zeus, still cloudy, but darker and made of flesh now.
I felt my breasts rise, and grow hard, I couldn't take my
eyes off the god. I pited him too, because he was thin
and black, and looked scorched to the bone with his
despair. His hands smoothered and soothed me, His black,
swollen lips brushed my skin. his tongue slithered and
slimed in my mouth. My thighs unclenched. I heard the
voice of Zeus, saying "Io, your time has come. Our time
has come." Then a crash of thunder--God was gone. I
was unhappy. I felt a flatness. I missed my lover. When
I reached our for him, I saw Hermes, the messenger of
the gods, standing by my bed, and waving me back with
his wand. "Io," he said, "I have come to join you in
marriage with the highest power." Then I pitied hermes,
because he seemed young and tense and unused to such
missions. His armour was like armour that had never been
worn, and not a feather on his wings was out of place.
Hermes said, "Zeus is on fire for you, Io. Don't you hear
the impatient grumbling of his thunder? Hurry. We must
leave this house, its molding would smother Zeus. Come
with me. The great pasture of your father will be the
marriage-bed of Zeus."... I remember that walk--hot
brown grass like an oven under my feet, excited cattle,
nudging against me, and rolling up their eyes. At every
step, I felt the slow swish and slap of a tasseled tail. The
air was thick and rich as hay. The whole pasture lay like
a huge panting body. Then I saw Zeus. He seemed to
say, "Take me. I must rest from my labors." Then I
looked at the cattle and thought to myself, "These creatures
do not take life, or frighten anyone. I will be like
them. They have never resisted the gods." Then I became
like them, I became God's creature, and Zeus, for
a moment, had his rest in me.

No rest, no sleep. I hid in my room--no sleep there,
only drawn-out hours of half-sleep, soiled and ruffled by
my guilty visions. Tongues sticking to my tongue. Rough
hands chafing at my breasts like the sands of the desert.
At all hours, the bellowing of animals, their tails curling
between my legs, the watery, seductive gurgle of their
throats, their thick tongues saying, "Go to him. Go to
him." I was changing, I was growing larger, I was with
child. Each new swelling of my body was terrible and
painful to me, butI thought Zeus needed me, I tried
to go to him. Then Hermes came again. His armour was
disheveled and comfortable on him now, and he spoke
with an easy arrogance, as he bloacked the doorway like
a veteran soldier, and chewed the tip of his wand. "Io,"
he said, "stay where you are. Have pity on Zeus.
He will not be pleased when he sees how you have swollen."
Then I fell. When I woke, I saw a woman sitting by my
bed, and I thought she was my old nurse, because she
was brown and wrinkled and healthy, and because she
was soothing my head with a cold cloth. But it was Hera,
the wife of Zeus, and she was bending close to me and
singing, "Sleep, my child. I give you a day and a day,
and perhaps another day, to gather your strength. Then
I must never let you rest." My eyes had red splotches
on them, and the pain made Hera's face tremble a little
menacingly in the heat, but soon the room was still, and
I saw Hera was doing her best to be gentle with
me, and was even trying to brush off two flies, as big as
her thumbs, that had crawled from my swollen stomach,
half-dead, and already beginning to mate. "Don't bother
with these flies," the wife of Zeus said. "When you see
them again, they will be a thousand. When women are
warm enough to make love, the gods send them flies.
The flies rise from your sticky flesh, are warmed by your
heat and kept alive by the blood from your thighs or
the milk from your breasts."

I went to my father. He kept looking off in the distance,
and counting on his fingers, as if he were counting his
herds. I said, "I have been visited by Zeus." My father
didn't hear me. He went on counting his fingers. Then
I said, "I am with child by Zeus." Then my father heard
me. In his madness, he struck me, and even sent out
men to beat the hills for the criminal. Then he sent
messengers to the oracles at Pytho and Dodona. They
answered darkly. "Give Io air. Let her breathe. Knock
holes in your walls. Tear the roof from your house." My
rooms were torn open. All day then, I was looked at by
the cattle and the heardsman and my father and the gods
and the winds. The holes were like eye-holes in a skull,
and Zeus seemed to be watching me through the eyeholes.
Then the oracle spoke more clearly. "Give Io air.
Give her the world. She must leave her father's house,
and run across the earth and never stop running until
she dies. If you try to hold your daughter back, the fire
of God will destroy your house and your heards and your
kingdom."

Then I began running, and my mind grew small and
hard. Horns began to push through the side of my head.
They hurt at first, but the swelling of my stomach stopped,
as if my child had stopped growing. Then I thirsted, and
forgot my horns and my child, and the gods let me wade
in the slow sweet stream of Cerchnea, and drink from
its pools. No flies were pursing me then, but the wife
of Zeus had already sent Argus, her herdsman with a
hundred eyes, to watch me. At each bend in the river,
I would see Argus sitting on the bank and dangling his
feet in the water. He would play pathetic tunes to me
on his shepard's pipe. He never harmed me, and only
watched, but his eyes burned like the heat of a hundred
suns. Then Hermes came again. He said, "We can still
do you small favors, Io," Then he waved his wand over
Argus and lulled him asleep and cut off his head. Then
a swarm of flies swooped for the head as it floated down
river. Suddenly, the flies swerved and turned on me. I
see them always before me and behind me now, beautiful
and stinging... Oh Zeus, I am blinded by your splendor
spread out before me like a peacock's tail with a
hundred eyes!... I shall never stop running.