The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales | Page 3

its inaccessible summit, it is reported, hangs Prometheus,
whom Zeus (let me bow in awe before his inscrutable counsels)
doomed for his benevolence to mankind. To him, as Aeschylus sings,
Io of old found her way, and from him received monition and
knowledge of what should come to pass. I will try if courage and some
favouring God will guide me to him; if not, I will die as near Heaven as
I may attain. Tell me on thy part what thou wilt, and let me depart. If
thou art indeed Zeus's enemy, thou wilt find enough on thy side down
yonder."
"I have been Zeus's enemy," returned the stranger, mildly and gravely,

"I am so no longer. Immortal hate befits not the mortal I feel myself to
have become. Nor needest thou ascend the peak further. Maiden, I am
Prometheus!"

II
It is a prerogative of the Gods that, when they do speak sooth, mortals
must needs believe them. Elenko hence felt no incredulity at the
revelation of Prometheus, or sought other confirmation than the bonds
and broken links of chain at his wrists and ankles.
"Now," he cried, or rather shouted, "is the prophecy fulfilled with
which of old I admonished the Gods in the halls of Olympus. I told
them that Zeus should beget a child mightier than himself, who should
send him and them the way he had sent his father. I knew not that this
child was already begotten, and that his name was Man. It has taken
Man ages to assert himself, nor has he yet, as it would seem, done more
than enthrone a new idol in the place of the old. But for the old, behold
the last traces of its authority in these fetters, of which the first smith
will rid me. Expect no thunderbolt, dear maiden; none will come: nor
shall I regain the immortality of which I feel myself bereaved since
yesterday."
"Is this no sorrow to thee?" asked Elenko.
"Has not my immortality been one of pain?" answered Prometheus.
"Now I feel no pain, and dread one only."
"And that is?"
"The pain of missing a certain fellow-mortal," answered Prometheus,
with a look so expressive that the hitherto unawed maiden cast her eyes
to the ground. Hastening away from the conversation to which,
nevertheless, she inly purposed to return.
"Is Man, then, the maker of Deity?" she asked.

"Can the source of his being originate in himself?" asked Prometheus.
"To assert this were self-contradiction, and pride inflated to madness.
But of the more exalted beings who have like him emanated from the
common principle of all existence, Man, since his advent on the earth,
though not the creator, is the preserver or the destroyer. He looks up to
them, and they are; he out-grows them, and they are not. For the
barbarian and Triballian gods there is no return; but the Olympians, if
dead as deities, survive as impersonations of Man's highest conceptions
of the beautiful. Languid and spectral indeed must be their existence in
this barbarian age; but better days are in store for them."
"And for thee, Prometheus?"
"There is now no place," replied he, "for an impeacher of the Gods. My
cause is won, my part is played. I am rewarded for my love of man by
myself becoming human. When I shall have proved myself also mortal
I may haply traverse realms which Zeus never knew, with, I would
hope, Elenko by my side."
Elenko's countenance expressed her full readiness to accompany
Prometheus as far beyond the limits of the phenomenal world as he
might please to conduct her. A thought soon troubled her delicious
reverie, and she inquired:
"Peradventure, then, the creed which I have execrated may be truer and
better than that which I have professed?"
"If born in wiser brains and truer hearts, aye," answered Prometheus,
"but of this I can have no knowledge. It seems from thy tale to have
begun but ill. Yet Saturn mutilated his father, and his reign was the
Golden Age."
While conversing, hand locked in hand, they had been strolling
aimlessly down the mountain. Turning an abrupt bend in the path, they
suddenly found themselves in presence of an assembly of early
Christians.
These confessors were making the most of Elenko's dilapidated temple,

whose smoking shell threw up a sable column in the background. The
effigies of Apollo and the Muses had been dragged forth, and were
being diligently broken up with mallets and hammers. Others of the
sacrilegious throng were rending scrolls, or dividing vestments, or
firing the grove of laurel that environed the shrine, or pelting the
affrighted birds as they flew forth. The sacred vessels, however, at least
those of gold and silver, appeared safe in the guardianship of an
episcopal personage of shrewd