h a
spark from the chariot of the Sun and hastened back to earth with this
royal gift to Man. Assuredly no other gift could have brought him more
completely the empire that has since been his. No longer did he
tremble and cower in the darkness of caves when Zeus hurled his
lightnings across the sky. No more did he dread the animals that
hunted him and drove him in terror before them.

Armed with fire, the beasts became his vassals. With fire he forged
weapons, defied the frost and cold, coined money, made implements for
tillage, introduced the arts, and was able to destroy as well as to
create.

From his throne on Olympus, Zeus looked down on the earth and saw,
with wonder, airy columns of blue-grey smoke that curled upwards to
the sky. He watched more closely, and realised with terrible wrath
that the moving flowers of red and gold that he saw in that land that
the Titans shared with men, came from fire, that had hitherto been the
gods' own sacred power. Speedily he assembled a council of the gods to
mete out to Prometheus a punishment fit for the blasphemous daring of
his crime. This council decided at length to create a thing that
should for evermore charm the souls and hearts of men, and yet, for
evermore, be man's undoing.

To Vulcan, god of fire, whose province Prometheus had insulted, was
given the work of fashioning out of clay and water the creature by
which the honour of the gods was to be avenged. "The lame Vulcan,"
says Hesiod, poet of Greek mythology, "formed out of the earth an
image resembling a chaste virgin. Pallas Athene, of the blue eyes,
hastened to ornament her and to robe her in a white tunic. She dressed
on the crown of her head a long veil, skilfully fashioned and
admirable to see; she crowned her forehead with graceful garlands of
newly-opened flowers and a golden diadem that the lame Vulcan, the
illustrious god, had made with his own hands to please the puissant
Jove. On this crown Vulcan had chiselled the innumerable animals that
the continents and the sea nourish in their bosoms, all endowed with a
marvellous grace and apparently alive. When he had finally completed,
instead of some useful work, this illustrious masterpiece, he brought
into the assembly this virgin, proud of the ornaments with which she
had been decked by the blue-eyed goddess, daughter of a powerful
sire." To this beautiful creature, destined by the gods to be man's
destroyer, each of them gave a gift. From Aphrodite she