story that Prometheus has exercised his eternal influence upon the
thought of men. In this form of the legend he appears constantly living
and striving for man's sake as the foe of God. We hear of him making men
and women of clay and animating them with celestial fire, teaching them
the arts of agriculture, the taming of horses, and the uses of plants.
Again we hear of Zeus, wearied with the race of men--the new divinity
making a clean sweep, and wishing to begin with better material. Zeus is
the lover of strength and the despiser of weakness, and from the earth
with its weak and pitiful mortals he takes away the gift of fire,
leaving them to perish of cold and helplessness. Then it is that
Prometheus climbs to heaven, steals back the fire in his hollow cane,
and brings it down to earth again. For this benefaction to the despised
race Zeus has him crucified, fixed for thirty thousand years on a rock
in the Asian Caucasus, where, until Herakles comes to deliver him, the
vulture preys upon his liver.

Such a story tempts the allegorist, and indeed the main drift of its
meaning is unmistakable. Cornutus, a contemporary of Christ, explained
it "of forethought, the quick inventiveness of human thought chained to
the painful necessities of human life, its liver gnawed unceasingly by
cares." In the main, and as a general description, this is quite
unquestionable. Prometheus is the prototype of a thousand other figures
of the same kind, not in mythology only, but in history, which tell the
story of the spiritual effort of man frustrated and brought to earth. It
is the story of Tennyson's youth who

"Rode a horse with wings that would have flown
But that his heavy rider bore him down."

Only, in the Prometheus idea, it is not a man's senses, as in Tennyson's
poem, but the outward necessity of things, the heavy and cruel powers of
nature around him, that prove too much for his aspirations. In this
respect the story is singularly characteristic of the Greek spirit. That
spirit was always daring with truth, feeling the risks of knowledge and
gladly taking them, passionately devoted to the love of knowledge for
its own sake.

The legend has, however, a deeper significance than this. One of the
most elemental questions that man can ask is, What is the relation of
the gods to human inquiry and freedom of thought? There always has been
a school of thinkers who have regarded knowledge as a thing essentially
against the go