Page:Prometheus Bound (Bevan 1902).djvu/27

 Man may see projected on an ideal scale the forces and motives at work in the ground of his heart. Some constituents of the Hesiodic story are absolutely discarded. While, for instance, in Aeschylus Zeus is simply said to have "taken no account" of mankind on his accession to power, and to have regarded them rather as rubbish than with any active hostility, in Hesiod a set quarrel between Zeus and Man is traced to the fraud which men, as instructed by Prometheus, had perpetrated upon the gods in the matter of sacrifice. The somewhat low cunning, which Prometheus displays in that episode, could only have misrepresented that subtlety of wit which Aeschylus meant his Prometheus to embody. So too the episode of Pandora and Epimetheus, the slow-witted brother of Prometheus, is taken no notice of in our play, where it would only have clogged the ruling motive, although it is true that the fragment of another play (which may have belonged to the Promethean trilogy) refers to Pandora, the "mortal woman begotten of moulded clay." (. Frag. 369.)