ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—her novel is subtitled: the Modern Prometheus—sounds the dark, tragic note of male Prometheanism: its pseudo-creativity, its false and monstrous galvanism. The author dealt with the fate of Masaniello and the tragic course of revolutionary drama. But the author can scarcely refrain from making, as the author write, the association over three centuries between two youthful firebrands, between the revolutionary tumults of Masaniello and of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, between the old Neapolitan and new Parisian incendiarism. Both in legend and in philosophy, the fateful association of fire with politics and power has ancient roots, as in the fragment of Heraclitus: "In its advance the Fire will seize, judge, and execute everything". In the collection of ancient Greek texts known as the Sibylline Oracles, which has preserved for us the visions of the early Judeo-Christian apocalyptists, fire is graphically associated with both the end and the new beginning of terrestrial things.
