Now in deed and not in discourse, The firm earth quakes. Deep and loud the ambient thunder Bellows, and the flaring lightning Wreathes his fiery curls around me And the whirlwind rolls his dust, And the winds from rival regions Rush in elemental strife, And the sky is destroyed with the sea. Surely now the tyrant gathers All his hoarded wrath to whelm me. Mighty Mother, worshipped Themis, Circling Æther that diffusest Light, the common joy of all, Thou beholdest these my wrongs!
Thus in the crash of elements the play ends. Fortunately our purpose with this huge old story thus treated by Æschylus, lays us under no necessity to involve ourselves in endless discussions of the Sun-myths, of the connection between ox-horned Io and the sacred Egyptian cow Isis; of moral interpretations which vary with every standpoint. The extent to which these _do_ vary is amusingly illustrated in an interpretation of the true significance of Prometheus, which I recently happened to light upon, made by a certain Mr. Newton, who published an elaborate work a few years ago in defence of the strictly vegetable diet. Mr. Newton would not have us misapply fire to cookery; and in this line of thought he interprets the old fable that Prometheus stole fire from heaven and was punished by being chained to Caucasus with a vulture to gnaw his liver. The simple fact, says our vegetarian, is that "Prometheus first taught the use of animal food, and of fire with which to render it more pleasing, etc., to the taste. Jupiter, and the rest of the gods, foreseeing the consequences of the inventions" (these consequences being all manner of gastric and other diseases which Newton attributes to the use of animal food), "were amused or irritated at the short-sighted devices of the ... creature, and left him to experience the sad effects of them." In short, the chaining to a rock, with a vulture to gnaw his liver, is simply a very satisfactory symbol for dyspepsia.
Untroubled by these entanglements, which thus reach from Max Müller, with his Sun-wanderings, to the dyspeptic theory of our vegetarian; our present concern is less with what Æschylus or his fable meant than with the frame of mind of the average man who sat in his audience, and who listened to these matters with favor, who accepted this picture of gods and men without rebellion. My argument is, that if this average man's sense of personality had not been most feeble he could _not_ have accepted this picture at all. Permit me, then, to specify three or four of the larger features of it before we go on to contrast the treatment of this fable by Æschylus with that by Shelley and Taylor in a later age.