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Prometheus

noun
1.
(Greek mythology) the Titan who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to mankind; Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock where an eagle gnawed at his liver until Hercules rescued him.






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"Prometheus" Quotes from Famous Books



... requested, Wherewith the king of gods and men is feasted. He, ready to accomplish what she will'd, Stole some from Hebe (Hebe Jove's cup fill'd), And gave it to his simple rustic love: Which being known,—as what is hid from Jove?— He inly storm'd, and wax'd more furious Than for the fire filch'd by Prometheus; And thrusts him down from heaven. He, wandering here, In mournful terms, with sad and heavy cheer, 440 Complain'd to Cupid: Cupid, for his sake, To be reveng'd on Jove did undertake; And those on whom heaven, earth, and hell ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... Gwynplaine was a terror. Even those who expected much found their expectations surpassed. It was as though on the mountain reserved for the gods, during the banquet on a serene evening, the whole of the all-powerful body being gathered together, the face of Prometheus, mangled by the vulture's beak, should have suddenly appeared before them, like a blood-coloured moon on the horizon. Olympus looking on Caucasus! What a vision! Old and young, open-mouthed with surprise, fixed ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... viewed from Sidi Mansur. They are fine, these moments of conflagration, of mineral incandescence, when the sober limestone rocks take on the tints of molten copper, their convulsed strata standing out like the ribs of some agonized Prometheus, while the plain, where every little stone casts an inordinate shadow behind it, clothes itself in demure shades of pearl. Fine, and all too brief. For even before the descending sun has touched the rim of the world ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... verge of our orchard like a snake half torpid with the cold,—it is sad to turn from an outward scene of so little comfort and find the same sullen influences brooding within the precincts of my study. Where is that brilliant guest, that quick and subtle spirit, whom Prometheus lured from heaven to civilize mankind and cheer them in their wintry desolation; that comfortable inmate, whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient consolation for summer's lingering advance and early flight? Alas! blindly inhospitable, ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... will have it that Greece was a migrated India: it was, of course, a migration from some place that first planted the Hellenic stock in Europe; but if the man who carved the Zeus, and built the Parthenon, and wrote the "Prometheus" and the "Phaedrus," were a copy, where shall we find the original? Indeed, there has never been a great migration that did not result in a new form of national genius. And it is the thoroughness of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... of war was heard again; Napoleon had broken forth from Elba, and everything was in confusion. Vast military preparations were again made, our own corps was levied anew, and my brother became an officer in it; but the danger was soon over, Napoleon was once more quelled and chained for ever, like Prometheus, to his rock. As the corps, however, though so recently levied, had already become a very fine one, thanks to my father's energetic drilling, the Government very properly determined to turn it to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... Prometheus brought down fire to men. This brought up water. The Gods are jealous—now, as then, They gave ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling

... with my sister Circe in her fairy island in the West, far away from sore temptation and thoughts which tear the heart! But if it must be so—for why should you die?—I have an ointment here; I made it from the magic ice-flower which sprang from Prometheus' wound, above the clouds on Caucasus, in the dreary fields of snow. Anoint yourself with that, and you shall have in you seven men's strength; and anoint your shield with it, and neither fire nor sword can harm you. But what you begin you must end before sunset, ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley

... fed on the flesh of their companions and infirm relatives; the first sepulchres of human beings were living graves, famished and insensible intestines. After long fierce centuries a divine man made his appearance: the Greeks call him Prometheus. It cannot be doubted that this sage had intercourse in the homes of the Nymphs with the Salamander folks. He learnt of them and showed to the unhappy mortals the art of producing and conserving fire. Of all the innumerable ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France

... with vapor and clouds, O Zeus," exclaims Goethe's Prometheus, "and practise thy strength on tops of oaks and summits of mountains like the child who beheads thistles. Thou must, nevertheless, leave me my earth and my hut, which thou hast not built, and my hearth, whose flame thou enviest. Is it not my heart, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... of one's nostrils; oxygen, air. [devices to sustain respiration] respirator, artificial respirator, heart and lung machine, iron lung; medical devices &c 662. lifeblood; Archeus^; existence &c 1. vivification; vital force; vitalization; revivification &c 163; Prometheus; life to come &c (destiny) 152. [Science of life] physiology, biology; animal ecology. nourishment, staff of life &c (food) 298. genetics, heredity, inheritance, evolution, natural selection, reproduction ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... might not move him now: he must die in his sins, at that dread season, upon that dread spot. Perjury, robbery, and murder—all had fastened on his soul, and were feeding there like harpies at a Strophadian feast, or vultures ravening on the liver of Prometheus. Guilt, vengeance, death had got hold of him, and rent him, as wild horses tearing him asunder different ways; he lay there gurgling, strangling, gasping, panting: none could help him, none could give him ease; he was ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... metals, to build houses, and other useful arts of civilization. But the human race became in the course of time so degenerate that the gods resolved to destroy all mankind by means of a flood; Deucalion {22} (son of Prometheus) and his wife Pyrrha, being, on account of their piety, the ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens

... themselves round the trees at its edge and scattering themselves among the thick branches till they were almost hid from view, David lighted a pine torch and gave it into the hands of the eager boy, who seized it and like a young Prometheus started forth. A single touch to the dry tinder was enough. With a dull explosion, the mass burst into flame. Shouting in his exultation, the little torch-bearer rushed on, igniting pile after pile, and leaving behind him ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... not appearing, heating worse than any fire, and a battle that hath no end. It crucifies worse than any tyrant; no torture, no strappado, no bodily punishment is like unto it." 'Tis the eagle without question which the poets feigned to gnaw [1642]Prometheus' heart, and "no heaviness is like unto the heaviness of the heart," Eccles. xxv. 15, 16. [1643]"Every perturbation is a misery, but grief a cruel torment," a domineering passion: as in old Rome, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... antiquity)—on the subtle reasonings and melting pathos of Euripides, on the harmonious gracefulness of Sophocles, tuning his love-laboured song, like sweetest warblings from a sacred grove; on the high-wrought, trumpet-tongued eloquence of AEschylus, whose Prometheus, above all, is like an Ode to Fate, and a pleading with Providence, his thoughts being let loose as his body is chained on his solitary rock, and his afflicted ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... to a hermit who had sinned violently in youth, and repented passionately through many years of strictest discipline. Catherine pours out her heart to him. The words in which Shelley's Fury drives home to the agonizing Prometheus the apparent tragedy of existence were ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... lineaments and limbs of a Titanic man chained and nailed to the rock. His beard has grown for centuries, and flowed this way and that, adown his breast and over to the stone on either side; and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice, ancient beyond the memory of man. 'This is Prometheus,' I whisper to myself, 'and I am ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... gods were the infirm shadows of the men who dreamed them. Who says, after familiarizing himself with the religions of the world, that Caliban or his theology is myth? Setebos has no morals. He has might. But this was Jupiter. Read "Prometheus Bound," and know a ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... there, are you? Sir," said he, turning to me, "I am the most unhappy man in the world. Talk of Sisyphus rolling the ever-recoiling stone—of Prometheus gnawed by the vulture since the birth of time. The fables yet live. There is my rock, forever crushing me back! there is my eternal vulture, feeding upon my heart! There! there! there!" And, with an awful gesture of malediction and hatred, he pointed with his wounded hand, swathed and ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... July, we exchanged signals with two or three others of our ships, which I took care to explain were on the look-out for my guest; and he seemed by this time pretty well convinced that an attempt to elude our cruisers would have been fruitless. On the latter day, the Prometheus showed her number, while we were at dinner: when Buonaparte expressed a wish to know whether the ships at Brest had hoisted the white flag or not. I sent for the officer of the watch, and desired him to ask ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland

... He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose—all the brutal epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but roared or moaned his ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes

... Greeks would have done with it!" said Wharton. "They would have set Zeus in a throne on Table Rock, firing away his lightnings at Prometheus under the fall." ...
— Esther • Henry Adams

... And vertue stoopes and trembles at her frowne. Then Aaron arme thy hart, and fit thy thoughts, To mount aloft with thy Emperiall Mistris, And mount her pitch, whom thou in triumph long Hast prisoner held, fettred in amorous chaines, And faster bound to Aarons charming eyes, Then is Prometheus ti'de to Caucasus. Away with slauish weedes, and idle thoughts, I will be bright and shine in Pearle and Gold, To waite vpon this new made Empresse. To waite said I? To wanton with this Queene, This Goddesse, this Semirimis, this Queene. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... the form of an apologue, in which, after Prometheus had given men the arts, Zeus is represented as sending Hermes to them, bearing with him Justice and Reverence. These are not, like the arts, to be imparted to a few only, but all men are to be partakers of ...
— Protagoras • Plato

... eyes on the ground. And there is a chance that this guide could not always retrace his steps if he tried—and why should he!—he is on the road, conscious only that, though his star may not lie within walking distance, he must reach it before his wagon can be hitched to it—a Prometheus illuminating a privilege of the Gods—lighting a fuse that is laid towards men. Emerson reveals the less not by an analysis of itself, but by bringing men towards the greater. He does not try to reveal, personally, but leads, rather, to a field where ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... wears off, and one sees how picturesque they are, with palm-trees and tall pigeon-houses, and here and there the dome over a saint's tomb. The men at work on the river-banks are exactly the same colour as the Nile mud, with just the warmer hue of the blood circulating beneath the skin. Prometheus has just formed them out of the universal material at hand, and the sun breathed life into them. Poor fellows—even the boatmen, ragged crew as they are—say 'Ah, Fellaheen!' with a contemptuous pity when they see me ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... giddy height and grandeur of the Dover Cliffs; Ibsen could not have wrought the climbing of the steeple into the crisis and calamity of "The Master Builder"; Teufelsdroeckh could not have uttered his extraordinary night thoughts above the town of Weissnichtwo; "Prometheus Bound" would have been impossible. Only one with at least a dram of dizziness could have conceived an "eagle-baffling mountain, black, wintry, dead, unmeasured." In the days when we read Jules Verne, was not our chief pleasure found in his marvelous way of suspending ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... fact that Terpander did invent the seven chords is not beyond dispute historically, while, mythically, Apollo and Amphion are credited with the idea. That Hermes invented fire-sticks seems a fable which robs Prometheus of the honour. We must not look for any kind of consistency ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... absolutely groans under over-material-production of every sort and degree, as on all hands is now acknowledged. The foundations of Manchester tremble under the ponderous piles of Cobden's calicoes, in Cobden's warerooms, ever, like the liver of Prometheus, undiminished, though daily devoured by the vulture of consumption. The sight of the Pelion upon Ossa, accumulated masses of pig upon bar iron, immovable as the cloud-capped Waen and Dowlais of Merthyr Tydvil themselves, should almost generate burning fever, intense ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... warehouse, was revealed as a person of taste and reading. Instead of appearing to her merely an indifferent person, to whom her fate had been chained, and whom she regarded in somewhat the same manner as Prometheus did his rock, I had become a pleasant companion,—a being of more vitality than ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... equal to this burst, unless it be the first speech of Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two Afrites. But Shakespeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalised truths, that "observation had copied there,"—followed ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... the rule of one god. From this they are led to take up the questions of theodicy or of the principles of the divine government. Aeschylus and Sophocles, writing perhaps about the same time as the author of the Book of Job, are full of problems of this nature. Why is Prometheus, though the noblest benefactor of the human race, doomed to undergo such sufferings? Why does a curse cleave to a certain house, evil producing evil from generation to generation? What is the relation between the divine laws which are written in the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... that you would not lose yourself amid temptation, or, if like Tobias, you had an angel to guide you in the stormy voyage you undertake. Into what derangement of pride has not man fallen, from the fabulous Prometheus, who sought to snatch fire from heaven, to the Philosophers of the eighteenth century, who extinguished fire in the lights of their reason. Prove to me that what you call human reason has in any manner purified or ennobled the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... we did not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. The knowledge that we cannot recall one lost day, nor alter one past page in our life's story, would bring a remorse cruel as the fabled vulture which ever fed upon the vitals of the chained Prometheus. But thanks be to God, Jesus says, "He that sitteth upon the throne saith, Behold, I make all things new." Dear brothers and sisters, some of us need to turn over a new leaf, to make a fresh start, how shall we do it? ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton

... time, till Hercules found out that he grew in force whenever he touched his mother earth, and therefore, lifting him up in those mightiest of arms, the hero squeezed the breath out of him. By and by he came to Mount Caucasus, where he found the chained Prometheus, and, aiming an arrow at the eagle, killed the tormentor, and set the Titan free. Atlas undertook to go to his daughters, and get the apples, if Hercules would hold up the skies for him in the meantime. Hercules agreed, and Atlas shifted the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... spark of Prometheus is burnt out, and now they substitute for it the flash of lycopodium,* a stage-fire which will not so much as light a pipe. The present generation may be compared to rats crawling ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... Oriental traditions into the classic world, we see a representation of the kind figure on several Roman sarcophagi, where it indicates positively the introduction of a legend analogous to the narrative of Genesis, and associated with the myth of the formation of man by Prometheus. One famous sarcophagus in the Capitol Museum displays in the neighbourhood of the Titan, son of Japetos, who is performing his work as modeller—a pair—man and woman—in the nudity of primeval days, standing at the foot of a tree, the man's gesture showing ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... [38] An interesting variation of this rhythm (though perhaps to be | | related to the Middle English descendant of the Anglo-Saxon | | long line) occurs in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Act I, | | | | O sister, desolation is a difficult thing. | | | | Compare also Shelley's earlier poem, Stanzas—April, 1814; | | and for a more recent example: | | | | Ithaca, Ithaca, the land of my desire! | | I'm home again in Ithaca, beside my ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... one of the small movable steps that were used when a girl wished to reach the highest shelf. Capturing it she carried it to the farther end of a narrow recess between two bookcases and doubled her angular length into a cozy heap for an evening with Shelley's poem of "Prometheus Unbound." That was to be the English lesson for ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz

... affliction, and of the mighty goddess his grand-daughter, or than the secret signs of coming woe in the palace of Hyperion. These things grew from darker creeds than Greece had ever known since the elder traditions of Prometheus—creeds that sent down their sounding plummets into far deeper wells within the human spirit. What had been meant, by the question proposed to Shelley, was no doubt— How so young a man as Keats, not having had the advantage of a regular ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is far more than a colyumist: he is a poet—a kind of Meredithian Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... in which the Negro lives. To him all the world is spirit. Miss Kingsley says, "If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in nature according to fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his superb 'Prometheus.'"[52] Fetish is a severely logical way of accounting for the world in terms of ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... Prometheus lyric, but when put back in its place it refuses to rest at Port-Royal which has a right to nothing but precision; it has but one real home—the Abbaye-de-Saint-Victor. The mind that recoils from ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... slopes of the mountain at his feet, where the heroic elect, fighting for a living faith, whatever faith it be, struggle eternally to reach the summit:—those who wage the holy war against ignorance, disease, and poverty: the fever of invention, the mental delirium of the modern Prometheus and Icarus conquering the light and marking out roads in the air: the Titanic struggle between Science and Nature, being tamed;—lower down, the little silent band, the men and women of good faith, those brave and humble hearts, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... that time many of Bach's compositions, such as the "Well Tempered Clavicord," with his young assistant, Hans Richter, who had been recommended to him from Vienna as a copyist. What cared he for all this wild whirl of silly fancies and boorish conceit, so long as he, a genuine Prometheus, could create something new after the grandest models! In speaking of "Tannhaeuser" he tells us how supremely happy he was when occupied with the delightful work of real creation. "Before I undertake to write a verse or sketch a scene, I am already filled with the musical spirit ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl

... are still under the thick shade of cerebral inertia. They have not yet seen the swift, bright light of a first doubt flash across the darkness of their brain giving to it a shock of unsuspected vibrations. As yet no glorious Prometheus has arisen amongst those primitive creatures far whom the discouraging counsel of the Italian poet might seem to have been in ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti

... to lofty verse Who sweep the earth with lowly wing, Like sand before the blast disperse— A Nose! a mighty Nose I sing! As erst Prometheus stole from heaven the fire 5 To animate the wonder of his hand; Thus with unhallow'd hands, O Muse, aspire, And from my subject snatch a burning brand! So like the Nose I sing—my verse shall glow— Like Phlegethon my verse in waves ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... the distinction between accent and quantity, and between the accents of common talk and the musical accents that occur in poetry. It is the best monograph on the subject, of which we know. Another article, "On Prometheus," clears AEschylus from the charge of impiety, because he appears to make Zeus act tyrannically towards Prometheus in the "Prometheus Vinctus." He also gave the results of some of his classical studies, in lectures in Edinburgh and Glasgow on Roman history and Greek literature. The principal ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... actual, be accepted as exact, there are all the possibilities and capabilities of corporeal transference, guided always by an unimprisonable will or intelligence." As he paused I murmured the lines from Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound": ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... that Prometheus, when he grew to man's estate, found mankind, though they were like him in form, utterly brutish and ignorant, so that, ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley

... enwrapt, Prometheus strove to trace Inspir'd perceptions of celestial grace, Th' ideal spirit, fugitive as wind, Art's forceful spells in adamant confin'd; Curv'd with nice chisel, floats the obsequious line, From stone unconscious, beauty ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent

... old man seems to have clung to Shelley's mind to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood. Shelley was by nature, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... first wife Harriet. Two years previous to this she had eloped with Shelley (see Vol. XVIII) to Switzerland, and they lived together in Italy till his death in 1823, when Mrs. Shelley returned to England, and continued her literary work. "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus," the first of Mary Shelley's books, was published in 1818, and owed its origin to the summer spent by the Shelleys on the shores of Geneva when Byron was their neighbour. It was "a wet, ungenial summer," according to the account Mary Shelley has left. "Some volumes of ghost ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... constituent; but they never could put them together again, or, by any similar compound produce the primordial egg or organic germ, from which a living being would arise. A connecting link—a vital spark, or animating soul—is always wanting to complete the existence of the Prometheus of the laboratory. Mark, too, the "if," and the "might," in this most lame and impotent hypothesis:—"If, therefore, these globules be identical with the cells which are held to be reproductive, it might be said," &c. Globules ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... principal thing. You cannot believe how delighted I was to hear some particulars of your music to "Prometheus." Our friend Uhlig, to whom I attribute excellent judgment, sends me word that he values this single overture more than the whole of Mendelssohn. My desire to make its acquaintance is raised to the highest pitch. Dearest friend, will you be kind enough to let me have a copy soon, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... and passes through many phases when it bears an old figure to the grave. The last phase of a world historical figure is its comedy. The gods of Greece, once tragically wounded to death in the chained Prometheus of AEschylus, were fated to die a comic death in Lucian's dialogues. Why does history take this course? In order that mankind may break away in a jolly mood from ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx

... feels instinctively that those who rise too high in excellence must be crushed. And this is the theme of every real tragedy. Othello, Lear, Njal, Grettir, Clarissa Harlowe, the Maid of Orleans, Antigone, Prometheus, and, as I hope to show, Tristan and Isolde, these are but a few among those who must perish from no fault in themselves, but because they are too noble ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight

... not surprised, I confess, at this grave misconception (10) on the part of Critias, for at the date of these occurrences he was not in Athens. He was away in Thessaly, laying the foundations of a democracy with Prometheus, and arming the Penestae (11) against their masters. Heaven forbid that any of his transactions there should be re-enacted here. However, I must say, I do heartily concur with him on one point. Whoever ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon

... race Ada See Byron, Augusta-Ada Adair, Robert, esq. Adams, John, the Southwell carrier Lord Byron's epitaph on Addison, Joseph, his character as a poet His conversation His 'Drummer' 'Adolphe,' Benjamin Constant's Adversity 'AEneid, the,' written for political purposes AEschylus His 'Prometheus' His 'Seven before Thebes' 'Agathon,' Wieland's history of Aglietti, Dr., MS. letters in his profession offered to Mr. Murray Albania Albanians, their character and manners Alberoni, Cardinal Albrizzi, Countess, some account of Her conversazioni Her 'Ritratti di Uomini Illustri' Her ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... antiquity, as well as of some of the earliest traditions of the race. For while the ark of Noah is said to have grounded on the top of Mount Elbrus before reaching its final resting-place on the neighboring Ararat, it was on Kasbek that Prometheus was chained to a rock for having stolen the fire of the gods and given it to mortals. In the mountain land of Colchis, Jason carried off the golden fleece, and Cadmus reaped a harvest of armed men from sowing serpent's teeth in furrows turned by the fire-breathing bulls of ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie

... animals. Sea-water also is undrinkable and brackish, but it feeds fish, and is a sort of vehicle to convey and transport travellers anywhere. The Satyr, when he saw fire for the first time, wished to kiss it and embrace it, but Prometheus warned him, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... in the West, far away from sore temptation, and thoughts which tear the heart! But if it must be so—for why should you die?—I have an ointment here; I made it from the magic ice flower which sprang from Prometheus's wound, above the clouds on Caucasus, in the dreary fields of snow. Anoint yourself with that, and you shall have in you seven men's strength; and anoint your shield with it, and neither fire nor sword can harm you. ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... quickly borne by the gentle breeze. And lo, as they sped on, a deep gulf of the sea was opened, and lo, the steep crags of the Caucasian mountains rose up, where, with his limbs bound upon the hard rocks by galling fetters of bronze, Prometheus fed with his liver an eagle that ever rushed back to its prey. High above the ship at even they saw it flying with a loud whirr, near the clouds; and yet it shook all the sails with the fanning of those huge wings. ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... heart that can love and suffer. It aided him in this respect however, that his inherent modesty caused him to look up to Helen as to a suffering goddess, noble, grand, lovely, only ignorant of the one secret, of which he, haunting the steps of the Unbound Prometheus, had learned a few syllables, broken yet potent, which he would fain, could he find how, communicate in their potency to her. And besides, to help her now looking upon him from the distant height of conscious superiority, he must persuade ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... Goddess approaches the mortal and in the other the mortal approaches the Goddess; hence, too, the severer punishment in the latter case. The second legend ought to be completed here by a fact derived from the story of Prometheus: the liver grows as fast as the vultures rend or consume it; thus again rises the idea of infinite repetition, now of suffering, not of action, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... symbol, but what it teaches us is that every Christian man who has passed through the experiences which make him Christ's envoy, receives the equipment of a new life, and that that life is the gift of the risen Lord. This Prometheus came from the dead with the spark of life guarded in His pierced hands, and He bestowed it upon us; for the Spirit of life, which is the Spirit of Christ, is granted to all Christian men. Dear brethren! we have not lived up ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... endeavoureth to secure himselfe against the evill he feares, and procure the good he desireth, not to be in a perpetuall solicitude of the time to come; So that every man, especially those that are over provident, are in an estate like to that of Prometheus. For as Prometheus, (which interpreted, is, The Prudent Man,) was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where, an Eagle feeding on his liver, devoured in the day, as much as was repayred in the night: So that man, which looks too far before ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... "Prometheus was the first that wished well to the sneezer, when the man which he had made of clay fell into a fit of sternutation upon the approach of that celestial fire which he stole ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... is thine, To quicken and inspire! Fabled Prometheus well might dare To steal from heaven such fire. For 'tis a beacon light to guide To rapturous joy and peace, In this our present earthly home, ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby

... know thou too shalt know; the place Is all to great Poseidon consecrate. Hard by, the Titan, he who bears the torch, Prometheus, has his worship; but the spot Thou treadest, the Brass-footed Threshold named, Is Athens' bastion, and the neighboring lands Claim as their chief and patron yonder knight Colonus, and in common bear his name. Such, stranger, is the spot, to fame unknown, But ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... spread along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun for sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of Prometheus had advanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The city-folk had stars of ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Virgil gave a glimpse, as it were, into that scene of retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a subject, to prevent the mind from experiencing weariness amidst the eternal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... be apprehended solely in its results. Rule applies but to the excellences of avoidance—to the virtues which deny or refrain. Beyond these the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed to build an Odyssey, but it is in vain that we are told how to conceive a 'Tempest,' an 'Inferno,' a 'Prometheus Bound,' a 'Nightingale,' such as that of Keats, or the 'Sensitive Plant' of Shelley. But, the thing done, the wonder accomplished, and the capacity for apprehension becomes universal. The sophists of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... heads against the rugged tree, Or, plunging headlong from the lofty rock, Their limbs to scatter to the winds. No law mysterious, misconception dark, Would the sad wish refuse to grant. Of all that breathe the breath of life, You, only, children of Prometheus, feel That life a burden hard to bear; Yet, would you seek the silent shores of death, If sluggish fate the boon delay, To you, alone, stern Jove forbids ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi

... kind have been found on which were Greek and Roman characters (a proof that the Greek would not have been understood without translation). Upon one of them is inscribed the name of AEschylus, in the genitive; and hence it has been inferred that his "Prometheus" or his "Persians" must have been played on the Pompeian stage, unless, indeed, this genitive designated one of the wedge-divisions marked out by the name or the statue of the tragic poet. Others have mentioned one of these counters that ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier

... reposes on no basis of unverified hypothesis, which makes no call upon a future after all somewhat problematic; as it would be unaffected by any discovery of an Empedocles (improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to what had really been the origin, and course of development, of man's actually attained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason or spirit in him. Such a doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... the denial of the will to live. Accordingly, Christ enters the world, and, representing Humanity, as Adam had done, saves the world by denial, of Himself, even to death. The other allegory is that of Prometheus. He also represents mankind, and his stealing of the fire means man's acquirement of a conscious soul, whereby he makes himself capable of sin. The gods put him in bondage and torment, representing the subjection to the flesh. But Prometheus ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing

... of matter, God gives form and regularity to the universe; and all other living creatures being produced, Prometheus moulds earth tempered with water, into a human form, which ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... that, in the beginning, Paine did not aspire to be the political Prometheus of England. He rather looked to the Whig party and to Mr. Burke as the leaders in such a movement. As for himself, a veteran reformer from another hemisphere, he was willing to serve as a volunteer in the campaign against the oppressors ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... the most barbarous persecution, they should have been able to hold their forces together, to restrain their natural anger, and to keep their faith in the ultimate victory of peaceable, legal, and political methods. Prometheus, bound to his rock and tortured by all the furies of a malignant Jupiter, did not rise superior to his tormentor with more grandeur than did the social ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... hardiment. Python is slain, yet his accursed race Dare look divine Astrea in the face; Chaos return and with confusion Involve the world with strange disunion; For Pluto sits in that adored chair Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir. O hecatombs! O catastrophe! From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary! Prometheus, who celestial fire Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind, Whereby we might the depth of nature find, Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart Which did such deep ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... interpreted in this way, is the legend of Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus are sons of the Titan Iapetus. The Titans are the offspring of the oldest generation of gods, Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, dethroned his father and seized ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner

... a Lyrical Drama, and other Poems. The Prometheus ranks as at once the greatest and the most thoroughly characteristic work ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... patriotism, and exhibiting the highest achievements of art. On his left, somewhat beyond the walls, the Academy, with its groves of plane and olive-trees, its retired walks and cooling fountains, its altar to the Muses, its statues of the Graces, its Temple of Minerva, and its altars to Prometheus, to Love, and Hercules, near which Plato had his country seat, and in the midst of which he had taught as well his followers after him. But the most impressive spectacle laying on his right hand, that small and precipitous hill "The Acropolis" ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden

... it. But how did the ancient dwellers on earth get command and possession of fire? The Vedic poets tell us that fire first came to them from the sky, in the form of lightning, but that it disappeared again, and that then Matarisvan, a being to a certain extent like Prometheus, brought it back and confided it to the safe keeping of the clan ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... notice claim, And hills by hundreds rise without a name; Hills yet unsung, their mystic powers untold; Celestials there no sacred senates hold; No chain'd Prometheus feasts the vulture there, No Cyclop forges thro their summits glare, To Phrygian Jove no victim smoke is curl'd, Nor ark high landing quits a deluged world. But were these masses piled on Asia's shore, Taurus would shrink, Hemodia strut ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... being more divine, Of soul exalted more, and form'd to rule The rest was wanting. Then he finish'd MAN! Or by the world's creator, power supreme, Form'd from an heavenly seed; or new-shap'd earth Late from celestial ether torn, and still Congenial warmth retaining, moisten'd felt, Prometheus' fire, and moulded took the form Of him all-potent. Others earth behold Pronely;—to man a face erect was given. The heavens he bade him view, and raise his eyes High to the stars. Thus earth of late so rude, So shapeless, man, till now ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... a very different light, being supposed to express the distress of Nature at earthly calamities. The Greeks believed that darkness overshadowed the earth at the deaths of Prometheus, Atreus, Hercules, Aesculapius, and Alexander the Great. The Roman legends held that at the death of Romulus there was darkness for six hours. In the history of the Caesars occur portents of all three kinds; for ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... conditions, and not dependent on them. But the melancholy Jacques of our ordinary experience either uses some narcotic or stimulant to excess, or else has trouble with his liver or kidneys. "Liver complaint," says Zangwill, "is the Prometheus myth done into modern English." Already historical criticism has shown that the Bloody Assizes had its origin in disease of the bladder, and most forms of vice and cruelty resolve themselves into decay of the nerves. It is natural that degeneration should bring discouragement and disgust. ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan

... seen Bailey in the small hours of that night he would have been satisfied that his words had borne fruit. Like a modern Prometheus, Bailey writhed, sleepless, on his bed till daylight appeared. The discovery that Ruth was in the habit of paying clandestine visits to artists' studios, where she met men like the little bounder who had been thrust upon him at supper, rent his ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... warriors became base and cowardly when they never risked their own blood in any way. Condemned criminals were compelled to take roles in which they suffered torture and a frightful death, in order to entertain the Roman crowd. Such roles were Prometheus, Daedalus, Orpheus, Hercules, and Attys; Pasiphae and the bull, and Leda and the swan were also enacted. In Martial's Epigrams, Book I, the cases are mentioned where a woman fought with a lion; ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... were a great number of stout fellows before Agamemnon, may not unreasonably induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to succeed him. Shakspeare made a better man when his imagination moulded the mighty figure of Macbeth. And if you will measure Satan by Prometheus, the blind old Puritan's work by that of the fiery Grecian poet, does not Milton's angel surpass AEschylus's—surpass ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... 'Julian and Maddalo,' in which Shelley and Byron (Maddalo) are portrayed; and 'Epipsychidion,' an ecstatic poem on the love which is spiritual sympathy. Shelley's satires may be disregarded. To the dramatic form belong his two most important long poems. 'Prometheus Unbound' partly follows AEschylus in treating the torture of the Titan who is the champion or personification of Mankind, by Zeus, whom Shelley makes the incarnation of tyranny and on whose overthrow the Golden ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... an Englishman's locomotion on a journey, is equivalent to stopping the circulation of his blood; to disturb the repose of a Turk on his, is to re-awaken him to a painful sense of the miseries of life. The one nation at rest is as much tormented as Prometheus, chained to his rock, with the vulture feeding on him; the other in motion is as uncomfortable as Ixion tied ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... science is sufficiently familiar to us in the exposition of Bacon. Line 12: repeats the same idea. Facts presented by Nature are of more value than any Ipse dixit. Line 14: he compares himself not without reason to Prometheus; for twenty-five years spent in prison were his reward for the revelation which has added a new sphere ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella

... that statue would have equalled the Colossus at Rhodes, and the demi-philosopher would have breathed flame like the Chimera; in the fabulous ages before that, he would have come down to us a god, or a demi-god, the rival of Prometheus, Hercules, and Atlas. Why not cast him in Achillean brass, the rival of the great hero of gunpowder and Waterloo, and make him breathe gas like the Dragon of Wantley, to illuminate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various

... his work on "Mythology," have highly reverenced Noah, and designated him as Noa, Noos, Nous, Nus, Nusas, Nusus (in India), Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, Osiris, Prometheus, Deucalion, Atlas, Deus, Zeus, and Dios. Dios was one of the most ancient terms for Noah, and whence was derived Deus—Nusus compounded of Dios and Nusos, which gives us Dionysus, the Bacchus of the Greeks, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent

... Brownings, each had already given evidence of the great powers they possessed, Robert Browning's tragedy of "Strafford" being produced on the stage in 1837, while his future wife's translation of the "Prometheus Bound" saw the light four years earlier. The Victorian period can boast no greater poetic names than these, each of which is held in highest reverence by its own special admirers. The patriotic fervour with which Lord Tennyson ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... Wanderer, after that which was fated had happened and I remained in my agony of solitude and sorrow, after, too, I had drunk of the cup of enduring life and like the Prometheus of old fable, found myself bound to this changeless rock, whereon day by day the vultures of remorse tear out my living heart which in the watches of the night is ever doomed to grow again within my woman's breast, I was plunged into petty troubles of the flesh, aye and welcomed them because ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... spend much of his time in fiddling? Foolish Word-monger and Motive-grinder, who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of Pleasure,—I tell thee, Nay! To the unregenerate Prometheus Vinctus of a man, it is ever the bitterest aggravation of his wretchedness that he is conscious of Virtue, that he feels himself the victim not of suffering only, but of injustice. What then? Is the heroic ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... for it. I have loved the great elemental art-works—the art-works that were born of pure suffering. For months before I began The Captive I read but three books—read them and brooded over them, all day and all night. They were Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair

... Psalms should be published in the same form, and should Kahnt decide upon retaining the form of the Prometheus score (as he writes to me) I shall be quite content and satisfied. The day after tomorrow I shall send him the instrumentation of the 23rd and 137th Psalms together with the score of the 13th. The latter is one of those I have worked out most fully, and contains two fugue ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated

... industry surmounts all obstacles.' In this way the guardian is seduced. But when God beholds the miraculous effect of Cain's agricultural management, punishment does not fail to ensue. A more delicate way of combining Genesis and the Prometheus myth no humanist had ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... sculptor, NICOLAS SEBASTIEN ADAM (1705-1778), known as Adam le jeune, born in Nancy, worked under equal encouragement. His first work of importance was his "Prometheus chained, devoured by a Vulture,', executed in plaster in 1738, and carved in marble in 1763 as his "reception piece'' when he was elected into the Academy. He produced the reliefs of the "Birth'' and "Agony of Christ'' for the Oratory in Paris, but his chief works are ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad, and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... darkest hour, it was Greek that surged in him—iambics of thunderous wrath such as those which are volleyed by Prometheus. But as he sat down to his writing-table, and unlocked the dear old album, and dipped his pen in the ink, a great calm fell on him. The iambics in him began to breathe such sweetness as is on the lips of Alcestis going ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... still not stake everything upon a single throw. For the supply of mental energy is as inexhaustible as the reservoir of all past experience, while the supply of physical energy involved in brain and nerve activity is, like the immortal liver of Prometheus, renewed as ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton

... originated either by Nimrod, who is related to have forced men to worship fire, or by Ninus, who caused the statue of his father Bel to be worshiped. Among the Greeks, as related by Isidore (Etym. viii, 11), Prometheus was the first to set up statues of men: and the Jews say that Ismael was the first to make idols of clay. Moreover, idolatry ceased to a great extent in the sixth age. Therefore idolatry had no cause ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... husband of mine, the unknown great man whom I love more and more every day, as I discover moment by moment the wealth of his nature, leaves the printing-house more and more to me. Why, I guess. Our poverty, yours, and ours, and our mother's, is heartbreaking to him. Our adored David is a Prometheus gnawed by a vulture, a haggard, sharp-beaked regret. As for himself, noble fellow, he scarcely thinks of himself; he is hoping to make a fortune for us. He spends his whole time in experiments in paper-making; he begged me to take his place and look ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... then in the conception of the Epic, which assumes a political as well as a physical Kosmos, or order; then in the grand moral ideas lying at the basis of the Mythology,—the myths, for instance, of Prometheus, and the picture of Nemesis and the Fates. Next, the deep sense of God speaks out in Grecian Tragedy and the great works of Grecian Art; and in the highest degree, in the Philosophy which culminated in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... dread, horror, or the most painful pity,—sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse lo ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... the steamship Prometheus came in and tied up near us, and soon word was brought that she would take the New Orleans passengers on board and sail immediately for that port. It now occurred to me that I could get nearer home by going up the Mississippi River than by way ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly

... nearest neighbor eight miles away. It was an impossible undertaking to keep a coal alive on a walk of eight miles. Wrapping a piece of cotton cloth tightly about a small stick he ignited one end at his neighbor's hearth, and like an humble Prometheus carried the smouldering gift to his little world and ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... the daring plan to secure the sovereignty is in a fair way to succeed. Meantime various quacks and charlatans, each with a special scheme for improving things, arrive from earth, and are one after the other exposed and dismissed. Presently arrives Prometheus, who informs Epops of the desperate straits to which the gods are by this time reduced, and advises him to push his claims and demand the hand of Basileia (Dominion), the handmaid of Zeus. Next an embassy from the Olympians appears on the scene, consisting of Heracles, Posidon and a ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... reader to another world. The characters are gods, the time is the remote past, the place a desolate waste in Scythia, on the confines of the Northern Ocean. Prometheus had sinned against the authority of Zeus. Zeus wished to destroy the old race of mankind; but Prometheus gave them fire, taught them arts and handicrafts, developed in them thought and consciousness, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... reflecting the sunlight like the outer layer. From the centre the golden pollen covers the fingers with dust like that from the wing of a butterfly. In the bunches of grass and by the gateways the germander speedwell looks like tiny specks of blue stolen, like Prometheus' fire, from the summer sky. When the mowing-grass is ripe the heads of sorrel are so thick and close that at a little distance the surface seems as if sunset were always shining red upon it. From the ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... P'an-ku's epoch, millions of years ago, was followed by ten distinct periods of sovereigns, including the "Heavenly emperors," the "Terrestrial emperors," and the "Human emperors," the Yu-ch'au or "Nest-builders," and Sui-joen, the "Fire Producer," the Prometheus of the Chinese, who borrowed fire from the stars for the benefit of man. Several of the characteristic phases of cultural progress and social organization have been ascribed to this mythological period. Authors of less fertile imagination refer them to later times, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... labour was impossible on the face of it. I attempted to go through regular courses of gymnastics at frequent intervals; but as my body and its members weighed nothing, my muscles found nothing whatever to expend their force upon. I thought myself worse than Prometheus bound upon his rock, for he could at least struggle with the birds of prey and pull upon his chains! I might as well have been utterly paralyzed, and I actually began to fear that I should lose all my strength, and that my muscles would ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass

... public appearance in Vienna at the Karnthnerthor Theatre on August 11, 1829. The programme comprised the following items: Beethoven's Overture to Prometheus; arias of Rossini's and Vaccaj's, sung by Mdlle. Veltheim, singer to the Saxon Court; Chopin's variations on La ci darem la mano and Krakowiak, rondeau de concert (both for pianoforte and orchestra), for the latter of which the composer substituted an improvisation; ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... England, or from any part of Western Europe, may easily visit the great mountain-chain on which Prometheus was found, by crossing the Black Sea from Constantinople or from Odessa, and landing at Poti, where the Russians have constructed a railway to Tiflis, once the capital of Georgia, now the residence of the Governor-General of ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... Prosecutor, "that the romance is not by a Councillor of State, but by a woman. For extravagant inventions the imagination of women far outdoes that of men; witness Frankenstein by Mrs. Shelley, Leone Leoni by George Sand, the works of Anne Radcliffe, and the Nouveau Promethee (New Prometheus) of Camille ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... to attain. Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain. This is the Law and the Prophets. Knock and it shall be opened; seek and ye shall find. It is demonstrated; it is a maxim. Man no longer paints his proper nature in some form, and says, "Prometheus had it; it is God-like;" but "Man must have it; it is human." However disputed by many, however ignorantly used, or falsified by those who do receive it, the fact of an universal, unceasing revelation has been too clearly ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... their far-flung speculations, never hit upon the idea of progress. To be sure, clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate faith that man in the past had improved his lot. Aeschylus saw men lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized estate which in Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance never was erected into a progressive idea of human life as a whole. ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... in sympathy, but in reality at his own sad fate. At that moment Prometheus himself would not have envied him his state of mind. The music set his nerves tingling and the dancers beckoned him on, yet he was bound to his chair, with no relief in view. At the tenth intermission he suggested soda-water again, after which they ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... commonplace life closes in around it, and the burned-out case, falling back to earth, lies useless and uncared for, slowly smoldering into ashes. Once, breaking loose from our prison bonds, we dare, as mighty old Prometheus dared, to scale the Olympian mount and snatch from Phoebus' chariot the fire of the gods. Happy those who, hastening down again ere it dies out, can kindle their earthly altars at its flame. Love is too pure a light to burn ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... that every page of his poetry is associated, in the minds of his friends, with the loveliest scenes of the countries which he inhabited. In early life he visited the most beautiful parts of this country and Ireland. Afterwards the Alps of Switzerland became his inspirers. "Prometheus Unbound" was written among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome; and, when he made his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him as he composed the "Witch of Atlas", "Adonais", and "Hellas". In the wild ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley

... removed? To all that are galled with gall-stones, to those whom the Chameleon litmus paper of "coming events casts their shadows before;" to Indian livers condemned, else hopelessly, to the fate of Prometheus, preyed upon by that vulture Hepatitis, in its gnawing and chronic forms; and to the melancholy hypochondriac, steeped at once both in sadness and in pains—she calls, and calls loudly, that all these should come and see what great and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various



Words linked to "Prometheus" :   titan, Greek mythology



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