trembling, already fearful of the worst, and beseeching with tears to know where her sister is--of liberty, and as twin-consort forces her to be his concubine along with her sister. Overcome with anger and thrusting all sense of shame on one side, Philomela threatens of her own accord to betray the deed. Tereus on this draws his sword, seizes and binds her and cuts off her tongue, informs, however, his wife by way of evasion of the death of her sister. Thereupon the sorrowing Procne tears off the fine linen from her shoulders and puts on mourning apparel; she raises an empty tomb and in a mode somewhat out of place, as it happens, laments the lamentable fate of her sister. How then does Philomela meet this? A prisoner, robbed of all speech, of her voice, she bethinks her of craft. With threads of purple she works the news of the crime upon a white texture, and sends the raiment secretly to Procne. The wife reads the heartrending news of her sister; she neither speaks nor weeps; she lives wholly in the image of revenge. It was the time of the festival of Bacchus. Driven forth by the furies of her passionate grief she forces her way to her sister; she tears her from her chamber and carries her off with her away. Then in her own house, while she still is in doubt what terrible act of vengeance she shall exact on Tereus, Itys appears before his mother. She stares upon him with eyes of wildness. How like he is to his father! No further word she utters, but consummates at once the doleful deed. They slay the boy and serve him on his father's table, who partakes eagerly of his own flesh and blood. He then calls for his son, and Procne exclaims that he carries within him that which he calls for; and, as he still looks about him and seeks after him and again asks and calls for him, Philomela sets before his face the bloody head. Then he breaks away from table with an awful cry of anguish, and weeps and calls himself his son's sepulchre, and forthwith makes after the daughters of Pandion with the naked steel. But now supplied with wings they float away from thence, the one into the forest, the other into the roof; and Tereus also, despite all the energy of his sorrow and desire of revenge, is changed into the bird which rears on its crest the comb of feathers, and carries a beak of immoderate projection. The name of the bird is the hoopoe.
On the other hand, we have changes which proceed from a guilt of less significance. As examples, there is Cygnus who became a swan, and Daphne, the first love of Apollo[145], who was changed into the laurel, Clyde into the heliotrope, Narcissus, who despised in his vanity maidens, and sees himself in the watery mirror, and Biblis[146], who was enamoured of her brother, and is, when he scorns her, changed into the spring which even now bears her name and flows beneath the shading oak.
However, we must not lose ourselves in further digression through particular examples, and I will merely, by way of passage, and the one further reference to the change of the Pierides, who, according to Ovid[147], were the daughters of Pieros and challenged the Muses to a match of rivalry. For ourselves the distinction of importance is the nature of the songs which the combatants sang respectively.
The Pierides celebrate the battles of the gods[148] and honour the giants unduly while they depreciate the deeds of the great gods.
Rising up from the depths of Earth, Typhoeus filled heaven with fear; in a body the gods take flight from thence until, wearied out, they rest on Egyptian soil. But here, too, so sang the Pierides, Typhoeus arrives, and the high gods are fain to hide themselves in illusive shapes. Jupiter was leader of the army, and for this reason, so ran their refrain, the Lybian Ammon to this day is figured with crooked horns; and in like manner the scion of Semele is changed into a ram, the sister of Phoebus into a cat, Juno into a snow-white cow, Venus is concealed in a fish, Mercury in the feathers of Ibis.
Here we find therefore the gods suffer reproach in their change to animal form. Although their translation is not presented as a punishment for a wrong or a crime, it is their cowardice which is held forth to us as the reason of this self-imposed metamorphosis. Calliope, on the other hand, exalts in song the good deeds and history of Ceres.
Ceres was the first, so ran the strain, to scour through the fields with the crook-backed ploughshare; first was she to give fruits and fruitful means of nourishment to the ploughed fields. First was she to lay down laws for our guidance; we are collectively but a gift of her wisdom. "Ah," she exclaims, "my task is to celebrate her, and yet how shall I tune my strain worthy of such a goddess! Assuredly the goddess is worthy of the singer's best." When she has finished, the Pierides adjudge themselves victors in the contest: but even as they endeavour to speak, and with loud cries, so Ovid informs us (v. 670), are flourishing about with their hands, they perceive their nails passing away into feathers, their arms become covered with down, while each is aware that the mouth of the other is closing up into the stiff bill of a bird: and while they are all for deploring their lot, they are carried up on the waves of their wings, they float away, the screamers of the woods, and as waifs of the air. And even unto this day, adds our poet, they still retain their own glibness of tongue and excited chatter, and infinite desire to gossip. In this way we find again also here that metamorphosis is presented us as punishment, and, what is more, is presented, as is so frequently the case with such stories, as punishment due to religious impiety.
(_β_) If we consider further examples of still well recognized metamorphoses of men and gods into animals, we shall find that, although they do not directly imply any transgression as the cause of such a change, as, for example, in the case where Circe possessed the power to change men into animals, yet, for all that, the animal condition is at least indicative of a misfortune and a humiliation, such as brings no honour even to the person who makes such a change subservient to private ends. Circe was quite a subordinate, obscure type of goddess, and her power appears as mere witchery, and Mercury assists Odysseus, when the latter contrives to free his comrades from the spell. Of much the same kind are the many shapes which Zeus takes upon himself, as, for example, when he is changed into a bull in his quest of Europa, or when he approaches Leda in the form of a swan, or fructifies the Danae in a shower of gold. In all these cases the object is one of deception, directed by purposes of an inferior, that is to say, not spiritual, but purely natural quality, purposes which the ever constant jealousy of Juno render unavoidable. The conception of a universal procreative life of Nature, which in many of the more ancient mythologies constituted the leading motive, is imaginatively reproduced in separate poetical tales about the easily enamoured disposition of the father of gods and men, exploits, however, which he does not carry through in his own or, for the most part, in human shape, but expressly either in the shape of animals, or some other embodiment of Nature.
(_γ_) And, lastly, we may add to our list those hybrid forms, combining both humanity and animalism, which are also not excluded from Greek art, though the animality is here accepted as something that degrades, is unspiritual. Among the Egyptians, for example, the he-goat, Mendes, was revered[149], and, according to the opinion of Jablouski[150], in the sense of the procreative power of Nature, generally speaking, as that of the sun, and to such an outrageous excess that, according to Pindar, even women sacrificed themselves to these creatures. Among the Greeks, Pan, on the contrary, personifies the mysterious sense of the divine presence, and later in the shape of fauns, satyrs, and Pan-like figures, the goat shape only appeared in a subordinate way, such as in the feet, and in the most beautiful representations was perhaps limited to the pointed ears and little horns. The rest of the figure is shaped in human guise, and the animal suggestion thrust back upon the barest detail. Yet, for all that, fauns were not recognized among the Greeks as gods of any important rank or spiritual forces; their fundamental characteristic remained that of a sensuous, uncontrolled joviality. It is true that they are also artistically represented with an expression of profounder significance, as, for instance, that fine example of one in Munich, which holds the youthful Bacchus in his arms, and gazes down on him with a smile which is brimming over with love and tenderness. He is not to be taken as the father of Bacchus, but merely the foster-parent, and we find given him here the beautiful feeling of joy in the innocence of the child, such as that which, in the maternal devotion of Mary for the Christ babe, is exalted in romantic art to so lofty a level of contemplation. Among the Greeks, however, this most charming love still belongs to the subordinate sphere of fauns in order to indicate that its origin is traceable from animal, that is natural, life, and consequently is entitled to rank with such a sphere[151].
Mediate shapes of a similar kind are the centaurs, in which we may also observe that the Nature-aspect of sensuality and desire is also supremely prominent to the suppression of the spiritual side. Cheiron, no doubt, is of a more noble type, a clever physician, and the tutor of Achilles; but this instructive _rôle_, as the teacher of a child, is not appropriate to godhead strictly, but is to be related with human ability and cleverness.
In this manner the relation of the animal shape receives a modification in classical art from whatever point of view we regard it. Its prevailing employment is to indicate that which is evil, bad, inferior, merely natural and unspiritual, whereas, outside Greece it was the expression of the positive and absolute.
2. THE CONTEST BETWEEN THE ANCIENT AND MODERN DIVINITIES The second grade of more elevated rank we may contrast with the degradation of the animal condition consists in this, that the genuine gods of classical art, inasmuch as they possess for their content a free self-consciousness, which we may define as the power of spiritual individuality reposing on its own resources, are also able to be represented as subjects of knowledge and volition, that is as spiritual potences. For this reason the _humanity_, in the bodily form of which they are presented us, is not, as one may say, a mere form, which is girt about this content by virtue of the imagination under a mode of purely external validity, but is rooted in the significance, content, and ideal substance itself. The divine, however, generally speaking, is essentially to be apprehended us unity of the natural and spiritual; both sides are involved in the conception of the Absolute; and it is merely the different mode, under which this harmony is conceived, which constitutes from our present point of view the respective grades of the various forms of art and historic religions. According to our own Christian way of looking at it, God is the creator and lord of Nature and the spiritual world, and therewith, no doubt, exempted from the immediate and determinate existence of Nature, for the reason that, before all else, he is very God as the taking back into Himself of his own fulness, that is as absolute and self-dependent Spirit; it is only the finite and human spirit which stands in opposition to Nature as a limit and a bound, a limitation which such only thereby overcomes in his determinate existence, and exalts himself intrinsically to the grade of infinity in so far as he grasps Nature contemplatively in thought, and in the actual world[152] consummates the harmony between spiritual idea, reason, the Good and Nature. This infinite actualization is, however, God, in so far as the lordship over Nature is strictly due to Him, and He Himself is conceived as explicit in this infinite activity, and the knowledge and volition of such realization.
In the religions of strictly symbolic art, on the contrary, as we have traced already, the union of the Inward and Ideal with Nature was an immediate association, which consequently made use of Nature both as regards its substance and form as its fundamental mode of determination. In this sense the sun, the Nile, the sea, the Earth, the natural processes of birth, death, procreation, and reproduction, in short, all the varied changes of the universal life of Nature were revered as divine existence and life. These Nature-forces, however, were even in symbolic art personified, and consequently set up in contrast to the spiritual. If, however, and nothing less than this is the requirement of classical art, the gods are to be spiritual individualities in harmony with Nature, mere personification is a conception insufficient for this result. For personification, in the case that its content is a purely universal force and activity of Nature, persists as a mere form, unable to penetrate to the constituting substance, and can neither give existence to the spiritual content in the same, nor its individuality. We find therefore necessarily in classical art a change of front[153], to the effect that, in conformity with the degradation of the animal aspect we have just been considering, the universal power of Nature also in one aspect of it suffers humiliation, and the spiritual is proportionally exalted in contrast to it. And by this means we find that it is the principle of _subjectivity_, rather than mere personification, which becomes the main mode of definition. From another point of view, however, the gods of classical art do not cease to be potences of Nature, because God here has not yet come to be represented as essentially absolute and free spirituality. In the relation of a merely created and ministrant creature to a lord and creator separated from it, Nature stands, however, albeit deified, either as we have it in the art of the Sublime--conceived as an essentially abstract, that is purely ideal masterdom of one supreme substance, or--as in the case of Christianity--exalted as concrete Spirit to absolute freedom within the pure element of spiritual existence and personal actuality. Neither of these examples falls in with the point of view of classical art. God here is not as _yet_ lord of Nature, for the reason that he does not as yet possess absolute spirituality either if regarded relatively to what is contained in Him, or to the mode under which He is apprehended.
He is no longer lord of Nature, because the sublime relation of the deified natural thing and human individuality has ceased, and taken upon itself the limitations of beauty, in which their just due must be rendered for art's representation without any tittle of loss to both aspects, the universal and the individual, the spiritual and the natural. Consequently in the god of classical art the nature-potency is preserved, but is conceived as such not in the sense of the universal and all-embracing Nature, but as the definable, and consequently limited activity of the sun, sea, and so on, generally speaking, as a particular natural potency, which is made visible as spiritual individuality, and possesses this spiritual individuality as its essential being.
For the reason, then, as we have already made clear, that the classical Ideal is not immediately present, but first makes its appearance through the process in which that which is negative to the formative content of spirit is resolved, this transformation and building up into new forms of that which is raw, unbeautiful, wild, grotesque, purely natural, or fantastic, which originated in earlier religious conceptions and views of art, will be a leading interest in Greek mythology, and consequently will necessarily reproduce a readily defined sphere[154] of particular significances.
In proceeding further to examine this fundamental aspect of our present subject I must at once give utterance to the preliminary caution that the historic investigation of the varied and multifold conceptions of Greek mythology lies outside our present task. All we are concerned to inquire into here are the essential phasal steps of this process of reconstruction, in so far as the same notify themselves as phases of universal import in the new artistic configuration and its content.
As for that infinite mass of particular myths, narrations, histories, things referable to a local origin and symbolism, which collectively still assert their predominance in the world of later gods, and incidentally appear in artistic production, but for all that do not belong to the vital point of interest to which our own effort is directed--we must necessarily leave all this broad field of material on one side, and can merely refer to an example or two by way of illustration. Speaking generally we may compare this road, on which we now move forwards, to the course of the history of sculpture. For inasmuch as sculpture places before the observation of sense the gods in their real form it constitutes the peculiar _centrum_ of classical art, albeit also the better to make it wholly understood poetry expresses itself upon gods and mankind, or passes in review the worlds of gods and men in their activity and movement in direct contrast to that objectivity self-contained in repose. Just as, then, in sculpture the moment of all importance in the beginning is the transformation of the formless, the stone or block of wood that has fallen from heaven (διoπετὴς)--as the the great goddess of Pessinus in Asia Minor actually was, which the Romans directed by means of a solemn embassy to be transferred to Rome--into the human form and so makes the statue, so too we have here to make a beginning from the formless, uncouth powers of Nature, and while doing so merely to indicate the stages, in their passage through which they are exalted into spiritual individuality and are finally concentrated in shapes of fixity.
We may in this connection distinguish three separable aspects as of most importance.
The _first_, which arrests our attention, are the _oracles_ in which the knowledge and volition of gods, still under a formless mode, gives witness to their presence through natural existences.
The _second_ point of view to be noted is concerned with the universal forms of Nature, no less than the abstractions of Right and so forth, which lie at the root of the genuine spiritual and individual deities, which are, so to speak, their birth-cradles and furnish us with the necessary conditions of their origin and activity: they are the old gods in contradistinction to the new.
_Thirdly_, and finally, we are made aware of the essentially necessary progress to the Ideal in the fact that the primarily superficial personifications of the activities of Nature and the most abstract spiritual conditions are contested and thrust from their prominence as something essentially subordinate and negative and, by virtue of this debasement the self-sufficient spiritual individuality and its human form and action, is suffered to attain an unchallenged masterdom.
This revolution, which constitutes the real central position in the historical origins of the classic gods, is in Greek mythology placed before our imagination in the conflict--a mode of presentation as naïve as it is astonishingly direct--between the old and new gods, in the headlong fall of the Titans, and in the victory which the divine race of Zeus secures.
(_a_) To take, then, first in order the _oracles_, it will not be necessary for us now to dilate on them to any considerable extent. The essential point which concerns us here is merely due to this fact, that in classical art the phenomena of Nature are no longer revered as such--in the way that the Parsees, for example, pray to naphthetic regions or fire, or as among the Egyptians, gods remain inscrutable, mysterious, and mute riddles--but that the gods, being themselves subjects of knowledge and volition, do verily give to man by means of natural phenomena indications of their wisdom. In this sense the ancient Hellenes made inquiry at the oracle of Dodona[155], whether they should accept the names of gods, which have come to them from barbarians, and the oracle replied: "Use them."
(_α_) The signs by means of which the gods thus made their revelations are for the most part of the simplest description. At Dodona such were the rustle and whisper of the sacred oak, the murmur of the spring, the tones of the brazen vessel, which the wind made thus to reverberate. In like manner at Delos it was the laurel which rustled and at Delphi, too, the sound of the wind on the brazen tripod was full of significance[156]. Over and above, however, such immediately natural sounds man is also the voice-piece of the oracle in so far as he is rendered deaf to and whirled away from the alert commonsense of his ordinary mind to a natural condition of enthusiasm; as, for example, the Pythia at Delphi was wont, stupefied by exhalations, to deliver the oracular words, or in the cave of Trophonius the inquirer of the oracle met with faces, from the interpretation of which an answer was delivered him.
(_β_) There is, however, another aspect which we should set alongside of the purely external sign. For in the oracles God is, it is true, accepted as He who _knows_, and the oracle of most famed repute is dedicate to Apollo, the god of wisdom. The form, however, in which he reveals his will, remains the wholly indefinite voice of Nature, either a natural sound, that is, or the unconnected tones of words. In this obscurity of form the spiritual content is itself equally obscure and requires _interpretation_ and explanation.
(_γ_) This explanation, albeit it brings under a mode of spiritual life the deliverance of the god which in the first instance is presented purely in the form of Nature's own voice, remains despite this fact obscure and equivocal. For the god is in his knowledge and volition concrete universality. And of the same type also must the advice or command unavoidably be which the oracle declares. The universal, however, is not one-sided and abstract, but as concrete universal contains the one side no less than the other. Inasmuch, then, as man stands over against the knowing god as one unknowing he accepts the oracular word itself in ignorance. In other words, the concrete universality of the same is not open to his intelligence, and he can merely select from the equivocal word of the god, assuming that he decides to act upon it, _one_ aspect thereof, for the reason that every action under particular circumstances is unavoidably _definite_, only, that is to say, giving a decisive impulse in _one_ direction and shutting off another. His action is barely accomplished, and the deed--which consequently has become his own and for which he must now be answerable--really carried through when he finds a collision confronting him. All in a moment he is aware that the other side, which lay already folded in the oracular sentence, is turned against himself and the fatality of his deed, his knowledge and will notwithstanding, has him in the toils; a fatality which he may not know, but of which we must suppose the gods are aware. Conversely again the gods are determinate potencies and their expressed will, when it carries this character of essential determinacy, as, for example, the bidding of Apollo, which drives Orestes forward to his revenge, brings about a collision of forces in the selfsame way. For the reason, then, that in one aspect of it the form, which the spiritual knowledge of the god assumes in the oracle, is the wholly undefined external expression or the abstract ideality of the word, and the form itself through the equivocal sense it contains includes the possibility of discord, we find that in classical art it is not sculpture, but poetry, and pre-eminently dramatic poetry, in which oracles contribute their share of the content and are of importance. In _classical_ art, however, they do essentially maintain a place, because in it human individuality has not forced its way to the full height of spiritual attainment, where the subject draws the determination of his actions without infringement from his own resources. What we in our modern sense of the term call conscience, has not as here secured its rightful place. The Greek acts often, it is true, at the beck of his passion, bad no less than good; the genuine pathos, however, which is here held to quicken him, and does in fact so quicken him, proceeds from the gods, whose content and might is the universal of such a pathos; and the heroes are either immediately instinct with the same, or they interrogate oracles for advice, when the gods do not present themselves openly to their vision, by way of quickening the deed to be done.
(_b_) Moreover, as in the oracle the _content_ is to be found in the gods that _know_ and _willy_ while the form of the external phenomenon is the external which is abstract and a part of _Nature_, from the other point of view that which is _natural_, if we look at it relatively to its universal forces and the activities which belong to these, becomes the _content_, from out of which the independent individuality has first to force its way up, and receives as its original form merely the formal and superficial personification. The thrusting back of these purely natural forces, the opposition and contention through which they are overcome is just the significant centre, for which we are indebted primarily to classical art, and which we must consequently submit to a closer examination.
(_α_) The first thing we would remark in this connection is attributable to the circumstance that we are not here concerned--as in that view of the world which belongs to the Sublime, or in part even that appropriate to Hindoo doctrines--with God already essentially devoid of any relation to sense, when regarded as the starting point of all creation, but rather with that in which Nature's gods, and we may add in the first instance the more universal forces of Nature such as Chaos, Tartarus, Erebus, the entire savage and subterranean substance, and, furthermore, Uranos, Gaia, the Titan Eros, Kronos, and the rest, supply the beginning[157]. It is from out of these, then, that the better defined powers, such as Helios, Oceanos, and others like them first have their being; while they, in their turn, become the natural cradle for the later spiritual and individualized divinities. We find, therefore, again here another theogony and cosmogony which is the work of the imagination, whose earliest gods, however, still remain for the observer under one aspect of an undefined character, or vaguely extend beyond all reasonable limit; and, if viewed from another standpoint, still carry with them much that is essentially symbolical.
(_β_) The more detailed distinctions among these Titan potencies may be thus indicated: (_αα_) First, we have those powers of the Earth and the stars, without spiritual and ethical content, consequently dissolute, a raw, savage race, gigantic and formless, as though they were scions of Hindoo or Egyptian imagination. They are to be classed with other individualities of Nature such as Brontes, Steropes, and again with the hundred-handed Kottos, Briareus, and Gyges, the giants and the rest standing in the first instance beneath the lordship of Uranos, then of Kronos, that chief of the Titans, who obviously is a kind of personified _Time_, devouring all his children, just as Time eventually annihilates everything that it has brought to birth. This myth is not without a symbolical significance. For the life of Nature is, in fact, subjugate to Time, and brings only the Past into existence, just as in the same way the prehistoric times of some people, which is only one nation, one stock, yet constitutes no genuine State, and pursues no definite objects essentially made clear to itself, becomes the sport of the power of a Time, which is destitute of history. We touch solid ground for the first time when we come to law, morality, and the State, something permanent which remains though races pass away, as it is said that the Muses give permanence and a defence to everything, which, as the life of Nature and present action, had only vanished swept away with Time.
(_ββ_) But, further, it is not only that the forces of Nature belong to this sphere of the old gods, but also the forces noted as earliest over the elements. In particular the first active agency upon metal through the force of what is still raw, and elementary Nature, that is air, water, fire, is of importance. We may mention in illustration the Corybantes, the Telchines, demons of both beneficent and evil influence, the Pataeci, pygmies, dwarfs, cunning in the woodman's craft, small, with big paunches.[158] More prominent notice should be taken of Prometheus, as illustrating in the chief place a fundamental point of new departure. Prometheus is a Titan of exceptional type and deserves exceptional attention.
Together with his brother Epimetheus he appears in the first instance as favourable to the young gods; then he stands out as the benefactor of men, who in other respects have no defined relation with the new gods or the Titans. He brings fire to man, and thereby supplies them with the means of satisfying their needs and working the technical arts, which are no longer, however, regarded as natural products, and consequently it would appear do not stand in any closer association with Titan workmanship. For this interference Zeus punishes Prometheus until Hercules finally releases him from suffering. At the first glance there would appear to be nothing strictly Titanesque in these main features of the story; nay, it would not be difficult to point out an inconsequence in the fact that Prometheus, just as Ceres, is a benefactor of mankind, and is none the less numbered among the old Titanic potencies. If we look at the matter more closely, however, this inconsequence will at once disappear. In this connection several passages from Plato's works will help us sufficiently to clear the difficulty. There is the myth in which the guest-friend recites to the younger Socrates that in the time of Kronos men originated from the Earth, while the god, on his part, devoted his attention to the whole[159]. After this step a movement of opposite tendency sprang up, and the Earth was left to itself[160], so that now the beasts became savage, and mankind, whose means of nourishment and all their other needs had hitherto passed immediately into their hands, were left alone without advice or assistance. Well, according to this myth, it was in such a condition[161] that fire was brought to mankind by Prometheus, all other accessories of craftsmanship being communicated by Hephaestos and his companion in craftsmanship, Athene.
Here we have notified expressly a distinction between fire and the thing which artistic ability produces by working on the raw material; and only the gift of fire is ascribed to Prometheus. Plato narrates the myth of Prometheus at greater length in the "Protagoras." There we read[162]: "There was once a time when gods indeed existed, but mortal beings had not appeared. When the foreordained time of their birth also had come, the gods created them in the inward parts of the Earth, composing their substance of Earth and fire and that which is the union of both these elements. When the gods were desirous of bringing them into the light, they handed them over to Prometheus and Epimetheus to apportion and arrange the energies of each singly as was right.
Epimetheus, however, requested of Prometheus that the apportionment might be left to him. After I have done this, quoth he, you may mark and express an opinion. Epimetheus, however, by a blunder apportioned everything worth having to the animal world, so that there was nothing left over for mankind; and when Prometheus made his inspection he found that though all other living things were wisely provided with all their needs mankind remained naked, unprotected, without covering or weapons.
But already the appointed day had appeared in which it was necessary that man should pass from the bowels of the Earth into the light. In the embarrassment in which he was placed to procure some assistance for mankind Prometheus stole the wisdom that is shared by Hephaestos and Athene by taking fire--for without fire it would be impossible to possess it or make it of use--and made a present of this to men. Man now, it is true, possessed the wisdom necessary for the support of his life, but he was still _without political wisdom_, for this was still lodged with Zeus. Entry, however, to the stronghold of Zeus was no longer permitted Prometheus, and apart from this the awful watchers of Zeus barred the way. He passed, however, secretly into the chamber which Hephaestos and Athene shared in the practice of their art, and having secured the forging-art of Hephaestos he pilfered that other art (the art of weaving) which was possessed by Athene and presented this to mankind. Out of these possessions the means of satisfying the needs of Life is provided for man (ἐυπoρία τoῦ βίoυ)." Prometheus receives, however, as already narrated, punishment for the thefts he commits owing to the blunders of Epimetheus.
Plato further tells us in a passage which immediately follows the above that mankind was still destitute of the art of war for their protection against the animal world, which was merely a part of the art of politics, and consequently were collected into cities, and would have so outraged each other and finally broken up such asylums for the reason that they were without all political organization, that Zeus found it necessary to send down to them under the escort of Hermes Shame and Right.
In these passages the distinction between the immediate objects of life, which are related to physical comfort, that is, the provision for the satisfaction of the most primary necessaries and political organization, such as sets before itself as its object what is spiritual, custom, law, right of property, freedom, and communal existence is expressly emphasized. This principle of ethical life and right[163], Prometheus did not give to men, he merely taught them the cunning by means of which they might overcome natural objects and make them serviceable to their needs. Fire and the craftsmanship which makes use of fire have nothing ethical about them in themselves; and it is just the same with the art of weaving; in the first instance they are devoted to the exclusive service of private individuals, without coming into any relation with that which is shared in human existence or with Life in its public character. For the reason, then, that Prometheus was