Qui terram inertem, qui mare temperat
Ventosum, et urbes, regnaque tristia,
Divosque, mortalesque turbas,
Imperio regit unus aequo.”
This representation of the philosophic lyrist of a late age is in perfect harmony with the epithets μητιόεις and μητιέτα given to Jove by the earliest Greek poets, and with the allegory by which Μῆτις, or Counsel personified, is represented as one of the wives of the Supreme Ruler. It is worthy of notice also, in the same view, that the legends about the Titans, Giants, and other Earth-born monsters, warring with Jove, are often attached to districts—such as Campania and Cilicia—in which the signs of early volcanic action are, even at the present day, unmistakeable; plainly indicating that such mythic narrations were only exhibitions, in the historical form (according to the early style), of great elemental convulsions and physical changes taking place on the face of the Earth.
Among the persons most prominent in that primeval age of gigantic “world-strife” (if we may be allowed to Anglicize a German compound) stands Prometheus; not, however, like his Titan brethren in character, though identical with them in descent, and in the position which he finally assumed towards the god in whose hands the supreme government of the world eventually remained. Prometheus, as his name denotes, strives against the high authority of Jove, not by that “reasonless force which falls by its own weight,” but by intelligence and cunning. Viewed in this character, he was the natural ally, not of the serpent-footed Giants and the flame-breathing Typhon, but of the All-wise Olympian; and such, indeed, Æschylus, in the present piece (v. 219, [p. 189] below), represents as having been his original position: but, as “before honor is humility, and before pride comes a fall,” so the son of Iapetus, like Tantalus, and so many others in the profoundly moral mythology of the Hellenes, found himself exalted into the fellowship of the blissful gods, only that he might be precipitated into a more terrible depth of misery. He was wise; nay, benevolent (ἄκακητα, Hesiod. Theog., 614); his delight was to exercise his high intellect in the elevation of the infant human race, sunk in a state of almost brutish stupidity; he stood forward as an incarnation of that practical intellect (so triumphant in these latter days), which subjects the rude elements of nature, for human use and convenience, to mechanical calculation and control; but, with all this, he was proud, he was haughty; his Titanic strength and his curious intellect he used, to shake himself free from all dependence on the highest power, which the constitution of things had ordered should stand as the strong key-stone of the whole. Not to ruin mankind, but to save them, he sinned the sin of Lucifer; he would make himself God; and, as in the eye of a court-martial, the subaltern who usurps the functions of the commander-in-chief stands not acquitted, because he alleges that he acted with a benevolent intent, or for the public good, so, in the faith of an orthodox Athenian, Prometheus was not the less worthy of his airy chains because he defied the will of Jove in the championship of mankind. Neither man nor god may question or impugn the divine decree of supreme Jove, on grounds of expediency or propriety. With the will of Zeus, as with the laws of nature, there is no arguing. In this relationship the first, second, and third point of duty is submission. Such is the doctrine of modern Christian theology; such, also, was the doctrine of the old Hellenic theologer, Hesiod—
Vain the wit is of the wisest to deceive the mind of Jove;
Not Prometheus, son of Iapetus, though his heart was moved by love,
Might escape the heavy anger of the god that rules the skies,
But, despite of all his cunning, with a strong chain bound he lies.