/lit/ - Literature

>In other words, the duplicity of power/potential derives from the sphere of Immortals itself. And when it is carried out—an act that constitutes the fault of Prometheus, failing to stem Olympian omnipotence—it means a fall (quite similar to the one that Heidegger's existential analytic will attempt to think) which the sacrifice recalls and whose acceptance of the fact mortals affirm in the practice of the cult. The failure of Prometheus does not simply turn the sacrificial rite into an act that symbolizes the complete segregation of the two races (mortal and immortal); it confers upon this separation the character of an irremediable and justified fall, one whose validity, each time by sacrificing in Promethean mode they engage in communication with the superior powers, mortals must recognize.

>It is in these terms that prometheia can be seen to determine mortality, giving to ancient Greek religion and politics, as well to the tragic, their entire meaning. Mortality is prometheia, and ever since Zeus realized that he was being duped by Prometheus, "human existence [has been] how we see it: entirely prey to the twofold struggle, unceasingly torn between," on the one hand, the good êris, which is made up of competitive emulation at work, and, on the other, fratricidal war (between Perses and Hesiod, between members of the same city, between cities). In this respect, it is somewhat astonishing to note the total neglect and forgetting of this Promethean origin, which has almost come to form the core of modern and contemporary philosophical analyses of Greek politics and religion, when Vernant has shown with utter clarity that "if the life of human beings, contrary to that of the gods, cannot shirk êris, it is because the mortal condition finds its origin and its raison d'être in the êris that set Prometheus against Zeus.

>Prometheus attempted to mislead Zeus, as a result of which there emerged the human condition. But the truth of the appearance of humanity is to be found in its disappearing: such is the vengeance of Zeus. The golden age is succeeded by a period of ills in which humans no longer dispose of anything ready to hand, no longer have anything, that is, to put in their mouth, now irremediably bent to the yoke of ponos, the labor that must be spent in payment for the lack of origin, for corn to appear. For, from now on, bios remains hidden in the belly of the earth, disappearing yet again and forever, like mortals themselves, while the obligation to work, to handle instruments, will reappear over and over again for these same mortals, until, grown old through care, they at last pass away.