How Tess of the D’Urbervilles drew on Prometheus Bound

A documented line of influence: Thomas Hardy demonstrably engaged Aeschylus’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.

Aeschylus · c. 460 BCE

Thomas Hardy · 1891

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On Tess of the D’Urbervilles’s page

Hardy ends the novel by quoting Aeschylus — "the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess" — his own rendering of a line from Prometheus Bound
It recasts Tess's destruction as the idle sport of an indifferent, cruel god, the Greek tragic frame snapped shut over a Victorian story
Read Aeschylus first and the final sentence stops being a flourish — it's Hardy reaching back across two and a half millennia for a god worth blaming

The line Hardy borrowed to seal a tragedy — Tess closes with "the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess"
That phrase is Hardy's own translation out of Prometheus Bound, flagged in the text as Aeschylus's
Aeschylus's image of a cosmos run by a cruel, indifferent power gave Hardy the exact words to damn the universe that destroys his heroine