10 THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS

drift like sand among rocks, is strangely siient in contrast.
It seems preoccupied, abstracted, and plunged into reverie.
Along innumerable orderly streets these masses hurry on unap-
parent and mysterious quests, moving from place to place, rov-
ing over an increasingly flattened landscape. Although their
goal is unknown, the roads thereto are marvelously smooth. A
faith in the ultimate beneficent external ordering of ways
and means of living has replaced the ancient faith in thought
and discourse as the free man’s instruments for obtaining the
life of reason. The modern masses are bound to be happy.
They are chained by adamantine laws through which a lone
and concealed and increasingly abstract spiritual force be-
comes manifest.

This alteration in spiritua: direction has a source and
symbol in Prometheus on the rock, punished for a crime of
such magnitude that he inspired never-ending terror in the
Greeks, yet he elicits only pity from the modern man.

Of all the heroes brought forth upon the Attic stage, the
giant Prometheus represented man in his largest dimensions
and in his vastest capacity for suffering. Certainly the dark,
enigmatical Titan of Aeschylus’ tragedy was the most spec-
tacular as well as the most monstrous of the tragic offerings.

The daimon Prometheus was the son of earth and a
brother of those Titans who had castrated their father and
had fallen thus under their father’s curse to the effect that
none of them should succeed him. In the Titans’ war against
the Olympian gods Prometheus had betrayed his brothers
and had aligned himself with the gods. Though he had used
all his guile in the defeat of his fellow Titans’ the gods had,
even so, rejected the victor’s claim of this ungodiy magician-
priest, and he had remained portioniess in their estate. Crafty
counselor to the gods, he was barred from enjoying their
rights. From his brothers, whom he had brought low, he was
eternally estranged. He was Prometheus the fateless.

Prometheus, arrogant, revengeful, all-knowing, and
wrathful, was a dangerous exi.e from divine communion, a

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