The Secret on the Rock
Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound · Prometheus, chained for giving humanity fire, offered freedom for one secret
He is chained to a cliff at the edge of the world. Every morning an eagle opens him and eats his liver, and every night it grows back, so that the eagle has something to come for. He is immortal. That is the entire design of the sentence: it has no end built into it.
He knew this would happen before he stole the fire. Knowing what is coming is what his name means.
Now a messenger has arrived with an offer, and it is not a trick. He knows one thing that the king of the gods does not: which marriage will produce a son who overthrows his father. Say the name, and the chains come off today.
He does not have to renounce anything. He does not have to say the theft was wrong. He only has to answer one question about somebody else's future, and the somebody else is a god who is not his friend.
The messenger explains, reasonably, that nobody is watching, that no one down there remembers his name, and that the eagle is due at dawn.
Say nothing
Tell them the nameOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
He says nothing, and Aeschylus does not write him as gentle about it: he taunts the messenger, refuses every offer, and the play ends with the cliff coming down around him. Generations later Heracles shoots the eagle, and Zeus, who by then wants the secret badly enough, allows it. Nothing about the sentence required it to end. In Aeschylus the theft was also much larger than fire: he gives humans number, writing, medicine, the seasons and the taming of animals, and, he says, blind hopes, so they would stop being able to foresee the day of their own deaths. Hesiod's older version is harder still, and blames the theft for Pandora and everything that came out of her jar.
The philosophers weigh in
Say nothing"They own the rock, the chain and the bird. They do not own what he says, and he has noticed that this is the whole of the inventory. I was born a slave; I would have said nothing too."
Tell them"Put it on one page. An eternity of agony on one side; on the other, a fact about a wedding, disclosed to a god who will find it out regardless. There is no version of this arithmetic that endorses the rock."