The triumph of Jupiter is the conquest of brute force over knowledge.
Prometheus then narrates how, by means of his counsels, Jupiter had gained his sceptre, and the ancient Saturn and his partisans been whelmed beneath the abyss of Tartarus--how he alone had interfered with Jupiter to prevent the extermination of the human race (whom alone the celestial king disregarded and condemned)--how he had imparted to them fire, the seed of all the arts, and exchanged in their breasts the terrible knowledge of the future for the beguiling flatteries of hope and hence his punishment.
At this time Ocean himself appears: he endeavours unavailingly to persuade the Titan to submission to Jupiter.

The great spirit of Prometheus, and his consideration for others, are beautifully individualized in his answers to his consoler, whom he warns not to incur the wrath of the tyrant by sympathy with the afflicted.

Alone again with the Oceanides, the latter burst forth in fresh strains of pity.
"The wide earth echoes wailingly, Stately and antique were thy fallen race, The wide earth waileth thee! Lo! from the holy Asian dwelling-place, Fall for a godhead's wrongs, the mortals' murmuring tears, They mourn within the Colchian land, The virgin and the warrior daughters, And far remote, the Scythian band, Around the broad Maeotian waters, And they who hold in Caucasus their tower, Arabia's martial flower Hoarse-clamouring 'midst sharp rows of barbed spears.
One have I seen with equal tortures riven-- An equal god; in adamantine chains Ever and evermore The Titan Atlas, crush'd, sustains The mighty mass of mighty Heaven, And the whirling cataracts roar, With a chime to the Titan's groans, And the depth that receives them moans; And from vaults that the earth are under, Black Hades is heard in thunder; While from the founts of white-waved rivers flow Melodious sorrows, wailing with his wo." Prometheus, in his answer, still farther details the benefits he had conferred on men--he arrogates to himself their elevation to intellect and reason [20].

He proceeds darkly to dwell on the power of Necessity, guided by "the triform fates and the unforgetful Furies," whom he asserts to be sovereign over Jupiter himself.

He declares that Jupiter cannot escape his doom: "His doom," ask the daughters of Ocean, "is it not evermore to reign ?"--"That thou mayst not learn," replies the prophet; "and in the preservation of this secret depends my future freedom." The rejoinder of the chorus is singularly beautiful, and it is with a pathos not common to Aeschylus that they contrast their present mournful strain with that which they poured "What time the silence, erst was broken, Around the baths, and o'er the bed To which, won well by many a soft love-token, And hymn'd by all the music of delight, Our Ocean-sister, bright Hesione, was led!" At the end of this choral song appears Io, performing her mystic pilgrimage [21].