[a] By the 1970s, both R. P. Winnington-Ingram and Denys Page had become sceptical of its authenticity, but the majority of scholars still affirmed the traditional attribution of authorship.

[b] Independently in 1977 both Oliver Taplin and Mark Griffith made forceful cases, on linguistic, technical and stagecraft grounds, for questioning its authenticity, a view supported by M. L. West.

To date, no consensus on the matter has been established, though recent computerized stylometric analysis has thrown the burden of proof on those who uphold the traditional claim.

[9][10] Before the play begins, Kronos, the ruler of the pre-Olympian gods (the Titans), had been overthrown by an insurgency led by Zeus.

For these acts of defiance, Zeus intends to punish Prometheus by chaining him to a rock in the mountains of Scythia.

The play opens with four characters on stage, a feature unique among the surviving corpus of Greek tragedy, in which a given scene rarely involved more than two actors besides the chorus.

[11] Kratos and Bia, personifications of brute power and callous violence respectively, are engaged in fettering the silent Prometheus to a mountainside in Scythia, and are assisted in the task by the begrudging blacksmith of the gods, Hephaestus.

He calls on the wind, the mountains' springs of water, the Earth and the Sun — to witness how he suffers unfairly.

Before they come closer, they hover in the air just above Prometheus, who hints to them that he is keeping a secret that will eventually cause him to have power over Zeus.

Prometheus responds coldly, and wonders why Oceanus would leave his caves and streams to see such a miserable sight chained to a rock.

Prometheus asks Io to choose: Does she want to hear the rest of her own future, or the name of her descendant that will rescue him?

The dialogue contains a sustained stichomythia between Prometheus and Oceanus, and also a unique series of quatrains sung by the chorus.

However by the time that Aeschylus read the Theogony, it had accrued significant additions that are now part of the extant version.

Parts of those additions — including the story of Hercules killing the eagle — are essential to Aeschylus' conception of Prometheus Bound.

[16] Another departure by Aeschylus from Hesiod's Theogony involves the two forms of punishment of Prometheus — the chaining to a rock, and the eagle's daily tearing of his liver.

Perhaps foreshadowing his eventual reconciliation with Prometheus, we learn that Zeus has released the other Titans whom he imprisoned at the conclusion of the Titanomachy.

In Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, the Titan finally warns Zeus not to lie with the sea nymph Thetis, for she is fated to give birth to a son greater than the father.

Not wishing to be overthrown, Zeus would later marry Thetis off to the mortal Peleus; the product of that union will be Achilles, Greek hero of the Trojan War.

Since the 19th century, however, doubts began to emerge, after Rudolf Westphal, in 1857 and again in 1869, challenged the idea that the text was the work of a single author.

[19] Two years later his student F. Niedzballa likewise concluded the text was written by someone else, on the basis of lexical analysis of words in the play not recurrent elsewhere in Aeschylus.

[20] Some have raised doubts focused on matters of linguistics, meter, vocabulary, and style, notably by Mark Griffith, though he remained open to idea that uncertainty persists and the traditional attribution might turn out to be correct.

The mythological and religious aspects are treated as secondary compared to the clash of wills that occurs between Zeus and Prometheus.

In the sequel, Aeschylus would have had the chance to give to Zeus' character an arc, and show him learning and developing more admirable and generous aspects.

Aeschylus was very popular in Athens decades after his death, as Aristophanes' The Frogs (405 BC) makes clear.

If Aeschylean authorship is assumed, then these allusions several decades after the play's first performance speak to the enduring popularity of Prometheus Bound.

Moreover, a performance of the play itself (rather than a depiction of the generic myth) appears on fragments of a Greek vase dated c. 370–360 BC.).

In 1979 George Eugeniou directed and performed in the play at Theatro Technis London setting the drama in the Greece governed by the Junta.

It was directed by Travis Preston, composed by Ellen Reid and Vinny Golia, and choreographed by Mira Kingsley.

[35] In April 2015 MacMillan Films, in the United States, staged Prometheus Bound for camera using Peter Arnott's translation with James Thomas directing, Tanya Rodina as Io, and Casey McIntyre as the Chorus Leader.