Tiresias: The Ancient Mediterranean Religions Source Database

7540

Lucian, Prometheus, 3

nan But here someone offers me a crumb of comfort: ‘That was not the likeness he found between you and Prometheus; he meant to commend your innovating originality: at a time when human beings did not exist, Prometheus conceived and fashioned them; he moulded and elaborated certain living things into agility and beauty; he was practically their creator, though Athene assisted by putting breath into the clay and bringing the models to life.’ So says my someone, giving your remark its politest possible turn. Perhaps he has hit the true meaning; not that I can rest content, however, with the mere credit of innovation, and the absence of any original to which my work can be referred; if it is not good as well as original, I assure you I shall be ashamed of it, bring down my foot and crush it out of existence; its novelty shall not avail (with meat least) to save its ugliness from annihilation. If I thought otherwise, I admit that a round dozen of vultures[1] would be none too many for the liver of a dunce who could not see that ugliness was only aggravated by strangeness. [1] vultures | Alluding to the vulture appointed by Zeus to prey on the liver of Prometheus. The whole of this absurd story is severely ridiculed by Lucian in his Prometheus on Caucasus.3)

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None available Subjects of this text:

subject	book bibliographic info
centaur	Mheallaigh (2014) 5
classicism	Mheallaigh (2014) 5
hybridity	Mheallaigh (2014) 5
lucian,and originality	Mheallaigh (2014) 5
metaliterary symbols,clay	Mheallaigh (2014) 5
mimesis	Mheallaigh (2014) 5
novelty	Mheallaigh (2014) 5
prolaliai'	Mheallaigh (2014) 5
prometheus	Mheallaigh (2014) 5
zeuxis	Mheallaigh (2014) 5