ABSTRACT
Prometheus' wisdom and strategy were critical to the victory of the gods. After the fall of the Titanomachy, Prometheus also helped Zeus to administrate his new regime, assigning various powers and privileges to the other gods. It was Zeus who commanded Prometheus to fashion the human race from water and earth. As the god of smiths, Hephaestus is, like Prometheus, a pioneer and teacher of technology, but now his skills are used to imprison and torture the rebel Titan. Prometheus is cast in the role of monster – outsider, throwback to a darker age, threat to the new social order. Prometheus received much attention from the Romantic crowd of artists and thinkers of which Mary Shelley was an important member. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is an immensely complex novel, fraught with these and other ambiguities and contradictions that render it productively dialectical and aesthetically compelling two centuries after the death of its author.
