Much more, nevertheless, had Elenko to teach Prometheus than she could learn from him.  How trivial seemed the history of the gods to what he now heard of the history of men!  Were these indeed the beings he had known “like ants in the sunless recesses of caves, dwelling deep-burrowing in the earth, ignorant of the signs of the seasons,” to whom he had given fire and whom he had taught memory and number, for whom he had “brought the horse under the chariot, and invented the sea-beaten, flaxen-winged chariot of the sailor?” And now, how poorly showed the gods beside this once wretched brood!  What Deity could die for Olympus, as Leonidas had for Greece?  Which of them could, like Iphigenia, dwell for years beside the melancholy sea, keeping a true heart for an absent brother?  Which of them could raise his fellows nearer to the source of all Deity, as Socrates and Plato had raised men?  Who could portray himself as Phidias had portrayed Athene?  Could the Muses speak with their own voices as they had spoken by Sappho’s?  He was especially pleased to see his own moral superiority to Zeus so eloquently enforced by AEschylus, and delighted in criticising the sentiments which the other poets had put into the mouths of the gods.  Homer, he thought, must have been in Olympus often, and Aristophanes not seldom.  When he read in the Cyclops of Euripides, “Stranger, I laugh to scorn Zeus’s thunderbolts,” he grew for a moment thoughtful.  “Am I,” he questioned, “ending where Polyphemus began?” But when he read a little further on: 

  The wise man’s only Jupiter is this,
  To eat and drink during his little day,
  And give himself no care—­

“No,” he said, “the Zeus that nailed me to the rock is better than this Zeus.  But well for man to be rid of both, if he does not put another in their place; or, in dropping his idolatry, has not flung away his religion.  Heaven has not departed with Zeus.”  And, taking his lyre, he sang: 

  What floods of lavish splendour
    The lofty sun doth pour! 
  What else can Heaven render? 
    What room hath she for more?

  Yet shall his course be shortly done,
    And after his declining
  The skies that held a single Sun
    With thousands shall be shining.

V

It was not long ere the gods began to find their way to Prometheus’s earthly paradise, and who came once came again.  The first was Epimetheus, who had probably suffered least of all from the general upset, having in truth little to lose since his ill-starred union with Pandora.  He had indeed reason for thankfulness in his practical divorce from his spouse, who had settled in Caucasia, and gave Greek lessons to the Princess Miriam.  Would Prometheus lend him half a talent? a quarter? a tenth? a hundredth?  Thanks, thanks.  Prometheus might rely upon it that his residence should not be divulged on any account.  Notwithstanding which assurance, the cottage was visited