which these ideals find expression. The ideals remain, but the forms of
their expression change, advancing from cruder to finer and from more
fanciful to more exactly true, with the advance of thought and culture.
Meanwhile, the ideals are above the world,--dwelling, like Plato's, in
heaven,--and there are always two alternatives for every man. He may go
back either with deliberate intellectual assent, or passion-led in
sensual moods, to the powers of nature and the actual human stories in
their crude and earthly form; or he may follow the idealisation of human
experience, and discover and adopt the ideals of which the earthly
stories and the nature processes are but shadows and hints. In the
former case he will be a pagan; in the latter, a spiritual idealist. In
what remains of this lecture, we shall consider four of the most famous
Greek legends--those of Prometheus, Medusa, Orpheus, and Apollo--in the
light of what has just been stated.

Prometheus, in the early story, is a Titan, who in the heavenly war had
fought on the side of Zeus. It is, however, through the medium of the
later story that Prometheus has exercised his eternal influence upon the
thought of men. In this form of the legend he appears constantly living
and striving for man's sake as the foe of God. We hear of him making men
and women of clay and animating them with celestial fire, teaching them
the arts of agriculture, the taming of horses, and the uses of plants.
Again we hear of Zeus, wearied with the race of men--the new divinity
making a clean sweep, and wishing to begin with better material. Zeus is
the lover of strength and the despiser of weakness, and from the earth
with its weak and pitiful mortals he takes away the gift of fire,
leaving them to perish of cold and helplessness. Then it is that
Prometheus climbs to heaven, steals back the fire in his hollow cane,
and brings it down to earth again. For this benefaction to the despised
race Zeus has him crucified, fixed for thirty thousand years on a rock