Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/109

 ZEUS AND PROMETHEUS. 77 is cheated into such a partition of the victims as is eminently un- profitable to him ; whereby Ms wrath is so provoked, that he tries to subtract from man the use of fire. Here however his scheme is frustrated by the theft of Prometheus : but his second attempt is more successful, and he in his turn cheats the unthinking Epime- theus into the acceptance of a present (in spite of the peremptory interdict of Prometheus) by which the whole of man's happiness is wrecked. This legend grows out of two feelings ; partly as to the relations of the gods with man, partly as to the relation of the female sex with the male. The present gods are unkind to- wards man, but the old gods, with whom man's lot was originally cast, were much kinder and the ablest among them stands for- ward as the indefatigable protector of the race. Nevertheless, the mere excess of his craft proves the ultimate ruin of the cause which he espouses. He cheats Zeus out of a fair share of the sacrificial victim, so as both to provoke and justify a retaliation which he cannot be always at hand to ward off: the retaliation is, in his absence, consummated by a snare laid for Epimetheus and voluntarily accepted. And thus, though Hesiod ascribes the calamitous condition of man to the malevolence of Zeus, his piety suggests two exculpatory pleas for the latter : mankind have been the first to defraud Zeus of his legitimate share of the sacrifice and they have moreover been consenting parties to their own ruin. Such are the feelings, as to the relation between the gods and man, which have been one of the generating elements of this legend. The other element, a conviction of the vast mischief arising to man from women, whom yet they cannot dispense with, is frequently and strongly set forth in several of the Greek poeta by Simonides of Amorgos and Phokylides, not less than by the notorious misogynist Euripides. But the miseries arising from woman, however great they might be, did not reach Prometheus himself. For him, the rash champion who had ventured " to compete in sagacity " [ with Zeus, a different punishment was in store. Bound by heavy chains to a pillar, he remained fast imprisoned for several gene- rations : every day did an eagle prey upon his liver, and every night did the liver grow afresh for the next day's suffering. At 1 Theog 534. OVVSK' epifr-o /?ouil<)f virepficvu poviuvi.