Prometheus in the Nineteenth Century

From Myth to Symbol

Caroline Corbeau-Parsons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351192132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"On Zeus' order, Prometheus was chained to Mount Caucasus where, every day, he was to endure his liver being devoured by a bird of prey - his punishment for bringing fire to mankind. Through the impulse of Goethe, his fortune went through radical changes: the Titan, originally perceived as a trickster, was established both as a creator and a rebel freed from guilt, and he became a mask for the Romantic artist. This cross-disciplinary study, encompassing literature, the history of art, and music, examines the constitution of the Prometheus myth and the revolution it underwent in 19th-century Europe. It leads to the Symbolist period - which witnessed the coronation of the Titan as a prism for the total work of art - and aims to re-establish the importance of Prometheus amongst other major Symbolist figures such as Orpheus."

PART I
From the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century

Man achieves a state of awareness in which he is no longer trying to revenge himself on a tyrant he has created, and so is no longer divided against himself.¹

NORTHROP FRYE

Myth is essentially linked to language: transmitted through generations, it appears as the cultural and historical product par excellence. To understand the nineteenth-century interpretations of the Prometheus myth and the specificity of the changes that occurred at that time, especially during its final decades, it is necessary to examine briefly the way in which the Prometheus myth constituted itself through history, in order to underline the evolution and consistency of Prometheus as a figure. However, given that our study is leading to the nineteenth century and notably to Symbolism, we shall concentrate on elements of the myth’s history that are essential to the understanding of this period and its artistic development. We shall therefore leave aside centuries during which the myth, or Prometheus’s persona, did not evolve in a way that would have influenced its nineteenth-century interpretations. Similarly, we shall leave aside or only briefly mention great literary figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, if their treatment of the subject did not have further repercussions, or modify the general shape of the myth. To make an exhaustive account of all the treatments of the Prometheus myth in history would be an impossible task, but Raymond Trousson, in his seminal work,² makes a detailed survey to which one can refer for specific information about the evolution of the Prometheus theme from antiquity.

In order to clarify the origins of the Prometheus myth, I shall turn to the work of Martin Day,³ whose approach to myths will be most useful for our purpose. Day distinguishes three different levels in the constitution of myths: first, at their roots, the archaic myth, which essentially relies on oral tradition; the intermediate myth, the product of a ‘highly conscious artist, dominated by aesthetic impulses and intent upon neat, attractive telling of a good story’⁴ and lastly the derivative myth, which will be our main concern.

CHAPTER 1
‘Archaic’ and ‘Intermediate’ Myths, or The Primitive Constitution of the Prometheus Myth

Etymology and ‘Archaic’ Myth

Prometheus in Greek means ‘the fore-thinker’, a man with ‘foresight’. The name derives from the Indo-European root ‘man’, extended to ‘man-dh’, a semanteme containing the idea of thought, wisdom, and reflection. In this respect, Prometheus is opposed to his brother Epimetheus (‘hindsight’), the clumsy character who does not think until after the event. The two brothers are so antithetical that Karl Kérényi named Epimetheus ‘Prometheus’ left hand’.⁵ They are so closely linked in the first accounts of the myth that Kérényi assumed that originally there was a unique hybrid being, Epimetheus-Prometheus, a creature similar to Plato’s androgyne which supposedly engendered mankind. Plato, in his Protagoras,⁶ revived the complementary brothers, relating how Epimetheus was assigned to endow living things with assets for survival, forgetting to keep anything for mankind, thus forcing Prometheus to steal fire from Hephaestus and wisdom from Athena to give it to them.⁷ As we can see, the mere etymology of ‘Prometheus’ plunges us into the myth itself. Louis Séchan⁸ and Jacqueline Duchemin⁹ fully explore the possible origins of Prometheus through the method of comparative mythology. In the present study, we shall attempt to throw light on the main traits of Prometheus, those that conditioned his later evolution as a persona. Even though, as Jacqueline Duchemin puts it, we might find the origin of Prometheus three millenia before our era in Sumero-Babylonian accounts,¹⁰ we shall concentrate on the Greek sources of the myth, that is, on what Martin Day terms the ‘archaic’ myth.

The son of the Titan Iapetus and Klymene, Prometheus is traditionally presented as the brother of Menoetius, Atlas, and Epimetheus. When Iapetus led the war against the Olympian gods, only Prometheus and Epimetheus, amongst his sons, sided with the Olympians. According to Wilamowitz,¹¹ there were originally two different Prometheus figures. On the one side, the Ionian-Attic Promethos, founder of Kodride, husband of Asia or Hesione, who was worshipped in Athens during the Prometheia. Promethos was venerated during the torchlight run, which celebrated the god or daemon of ceramics (not the fire-giver). He was the patron deity of potters in Athens. Such a craft implying the mastery of fire, he was soon associated with Hephaestus, considered in that region as his youngest brother, beside whom he had an altar in the Academy with Athena (patroness of the arts and crafts). It is he who was said to have aided Zeus to get over a terrible headache by splitting his skull in two in order to give birth to Athena, and also to have shaped Pandora, before creating all human beings. In no sense does he steal fire from Zeus to aid men: he is not his enemy and does not incur celestial punishment. As Louis Séchan notes,¹² these features belong to the second Prometheus, the Boeotian-Locrian one, whose name eventually predominated. He was Hesiod’s Prometheus, who also partly inspired Aeschylus.

Prometheus’s duality was to be of great importance, as it determined the two facets that would influence the evolution of his persona: Prometheus plasticator and Prometheus the fire-giver. Let us now consider the ‘intermediate’ myth of Prometheus, through the accounts of Hesiod and Aeschylus, who both crucially shaped this persona.

The Constitution of Prometheus's Persona through the Intermediate Myth

Prometheus the Fire-Giver

Hesiod in the Theogony (lines 507–16)¹³ relates that in Mekone, where gods and mortals used to meet during the golden age, Prometheus, who wanted to trick Zeus, carved up an ox for the feast, and divided it into two portions. He covered the best pieces with the ox’s gut, and decorated the bones with enticing white fat. Then, when the Titan asked Zeus to choose between the two portions, the god naturally pointed to the inferior one. Furious at having been tricked, Zeus forbade mankind from receiving the gift of fire, therefore indirectly punishing Prometheus. However, the account does not end here. Determined to ensure that men would benefit from a civilized life, Prometheus stole fire in a fennel stalk and gave it to men. As a punishment, Zeus sent the first woman amongst them, created by Hephaestus and attractively dressed by Athena, whilst Prometheus was chained to a pillar to endure perpetual torture. Each day, an eagle was to tear out his liver, which would regrow every night to let the bird devour it anew. A point of note, in the Theogony, is the mention of Epimetheus, associated with Pandora, who in this work is not yet given a name. Epimetheus, not Prometheus, is referred to as the one to blame for ‘the unhappiness of men eating bread, by being the first to receive under his roof the virgin formed by Zeus’ (lines 512–14).

The persona of Prometheus in Works and Days¹⁴ is very different, the Titan being presented by Hesiod as the one responsible for man’s misery. As Theodore Ziolkowski puts it, whereas ‘in the Theogony, Prometheus appears midway in the divine genealogy as a god cast out for reasons described in lavish detail, in the human context of Works and Days, in contrast, he stands at the beginning of human history as the source of man’s grief and misery’.¹⁵ Prometheus is punished for being a trickster and breaking the law. Far from being the benefactor of mankind, he is to blame for its fall. In the words of Zeus:

Son of Iapetos, clever above all others, you are pleased at having stolen fire and outwitted me — a great calamity both for yourself and for men to come. To set against the fire I shall give them an affliction in which they will all delight as they embrace their own misfortune.¹⁶

(lines 55–59)

Such a contrast between the two works might be explained by the nature of Works and Days, a moral poem addressed to Hesiod’s brother, Perses, who was in need of guidance in this regard. The focus of the poem, which deals mainly with Pandora, is also an element of explanation for the shift in Prometheus’s persona. Because he is responsible for the existence of Pandora, he is also consequently responsible for the misery following her arrival on Earth.

In any case, we can see that Prometheus’s characteristic role as the benefactor of mankind does not derive from Hesiod. The specific quality of the Titan which Hesiod emphasized through the gift of fire was trickery. Aeschylus took the opposite view from Hesiod on the Prometheus myth: where Hesiod emphasized the loss of the golden age, he saw the Titan as the initiator of progress.

Prometheus the Rebel

Chez Hésiode, l’être humain était étroitement assujetti aux dieux; dans le Prométhée, il se forge un destin.¹⁷

Although artistic depictions of Prometheus flourished during the sixth century, Prometheus did not inspire many writers, and, in spite of a few comic treatments of the myth, detailed by Jacqueline Duchemin,¹⁸ this period did not determine the evolution of the Prometheus myth. Far greater was the influence of Aeschylus on the treatment of the myth and the development of Prometheus as a persona. Prior to writing the influential Prometheus Unbound, Aeschylus had written another play entitled Prometheus the Firelighter. This satyr play was probably performed in 472 BC, the same year as the Persians, which led Jacqueline Duchemin to assume that because ‘the first play the Prometheus legend inspired Aeschylus to write was not a tragedy, but a satyr play, [...] one could therefore be tempted to think that he was the first to treat the subject in a tragic way, and that he certainly did so at the end of his life’,¹⁹ an appealing but not necessarily convincing hypothesis. However, the work that determined the evolution of the myth was Prometheus Bound. Before examining the play itself and its impact on the constitution of the Prometheus myth, we should note that Prometheus Bound remains problematic, for three main reasons.

Firstly, even though it has been attributed to Aeschylus since the third century BC, scholars still dispute the authenticity of Prometheus Bound.²⁰ Apart from the fact that its style is more prosaic than others of Aeschylus’s works, and that it presents staging issues that may not have been solvable in his lifetime, this debate is sustained by the fact that Aeschylus, a man of strong faith, truly believed in the justice of Zeus and in universal harmony. The Suppliants, the Orestia, or the Persians all demonstrate a coincidence between Zeus and Ananke (the Aeschylean concept of destiny or necessity, deprived of the ...