| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
| |
| |
| NUMBER: | 26429 |
| QUOTATION: | The kinship between the Prometheus myth and the Book of Job is obvious enough. Both heroes, blameless and upright, suffer at the hand, or at least by the leave, of the Supreme Deity. But the Book of Job ends in the utter confusion of man’s intelligence. “There have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not ... Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.” The stricken Titan, on the contrary, in the closing words of Aeschylus’s tragedy, still protests against his “wrongs.” We feel that the Greeks could not have stopped at that point; their spirit was not one of Shelleyan defiance or Byronic despair.... Higher than the caprices and pride of Zeus, higher also than the desperate endeavor of Prometheus, stands intelligent law. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Albert L. Guerard (b. 1914), U.S. author, educator. “Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Art for Art’s Sake, Lothrop, Lee and Shepard (1936). |
| |
| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
|
|
