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Rh willing but subordinate executors of their father's will. It seems improbable that in the Promethean trilogy alone he should assume an attitude towards the popular religion utterly irreconcilable with the tendencies manifested in his remaining works; the apparent contradiction has doubtless arisen from the loss of the concluding drama. I agree with those critics who think that if we possessed it we should see the majesty of Zeus fully vindicated, and reconciliation established between the contending powers.

As it seems unreasonable to accept, without qualification, the gross picture of Zeus as represented, in the extant drama, by his exasperated adversary, Prometheus, so we must look elsewhere for the true ground of the antagonism subsisting between him and the Olympian divinities, all of whom are arrayed against him. Though the Promethean myth, as related by Plato, in the "Protagoras," differs in many essential features from the version of Æschylus, yet the fundamental thought there embodied is so completely in harmony with the teaching of the prophet-bard, that it may be referred to as, perhaps, throwing light upon the moral significance of the trilogy. In the "Protagoras" a distinction is drawn between the wisdom which ministers to physical well-being, and political wisdom which enables men to live in organized communities. Prometheus is represented as having endowed men with the former, but as unable to invest them with the latter, which involved the exercise of justice, and was under the special guardianship of Zeus. Now it is this