Prometheus has been a favorite subject with the poets.  He is represented as the friend of mankind, who interposed in their behalf when Jove was incensed against them, and who taught them civilization and the arts.  But as, in so doing, he transgressed the will of Jupiter, he drew down on himself the anger of the ruler of gods and men.  Jupiter had him chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where a vulture preyed on his liver, which was renewed as fast as devoured.  This state of torment might have been brought to an end at any time by Prometheus, if he had been willing to submit to his oppressor; for he possessed a secret which involved the stability of Jove’s throne, and if he would have revealed it, he might have been at once taken into favor.  But that he disdained to do.  He has therefore become the symbol of magnanimous endurance of unmerited suffering, and strength of will resisting oppression.

Byron and Shelley have both treated this theme.  The following are Byron’s lines: 

    “Titan! to whose immortal eyes
       The sufferings of mortality,
       Seen in their sad reality,
     Were not as things that gods despise;
     What was thy pity’s recompense? 
     A silent suffering, and intense;
     The rock, the vulture, and the chain;
     All that the proud can feel of pain;
     The agony they do not show;
     The suffocating sense of woe.

    “Thy godlike crime was to be kind;
       To render with thy precepts less
       The sum of human wretchedness,
     And strengthen man with his own mind. 
       And, baffled as thou wert from high,
       Still, in thy patient energy
     In the endurance and repulse
       Of thine impenetrable spirit,
     Which earth and heaven could not convulse,
       A mighty lesson we inherit.”

Byron also employs the same allusion, in his
“Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte”: 

    “Or, like the thief of fire from heaven,
       Wilt thou withstand the shock? 
     And share with him—­the unforgiven—­
       His vulture and his rock?”

CHAPTER III

APOLLO AND DAPHNE—­PYRAMUS AND THISBE CEPHALUS AND PROCRIS

The slime with which the earth was covered by the waters of the flood produced an excessive fertility, which called forth every variety of production, both bad and good.  Among the rest, Python, an enormous serpent, crept forth, the terror of the people, and lurked in the caves of Mount Parnassus.  Apollo slew him with his arrows—­weapons which he had not before used against any but feeble animals, hares, wild goats, and such game.  In commemoration of this illustrious conquest he instituted the Pythian games, in which the victor in feats of strength, swiftness of foot, or in the chariot race was crowned with a wreath of beech leaves; for the laurel was not yet adopted by Apollo as his own tree.