ABSTRACT
In 1814, more than forty years after the 1773 Prometheus fragment, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, reflecting on the importance of the Titan in his own life, drew a parallel between Prometheus and himself. In 1773, the twenty-four-year-old Goethe began a play on the subject of Prometheus. The seven-strophe ode Goethe composed in 1774 appears as the illustration of Prometheus's revolt against the Olympian gods, but takes another form and value from that expressed in the fragment. In 1775, Friedrich Jacobi published the poem Goethe had sent him, without his permission and without mentioning his name, using the ode as an example of pure Spinozism. As in the Prometheus dramatic fragment, Goethe recognizes only one supreme power, that of Destiny. Prometheus's humanization was certainly a natural event within the dynamis of the myth, as Jacqueline Duchemin remarked. Goethe's view of Prometheus was at the basis of the Romantic interpretation of the Prometheus myth, and was in the air du temps.
