I can't see him ahead;

I am — and eternal, for I am...

The overflow of the individual soul with powerful experiences in this drama in Goethe no longer fits within the boundaries of earthly individuality. Only death can open further expanses of spiritual experiences. Prometheus says here to Pandora: (220)

When to the innermost depths,

You feel, you are shocked,

Everything that I have known until then, as sorrow or happiness, |

And wants in a storm of tears

To pour out an overflowing heart,

But the more full of thunder,

And everything in you sounds, trembles, trembles,

And the feeling languidly covers the mist,

And the visible disappears from the eyes,

You're drooping,

And everything around you sinks into the night,

And in an indescribable sensation you

Encompass the whole world,

That moment is death.

Here, then, the wise and scientific individualism from the point of view of which Boccaccio, four hundred years before Goethe, understood the symbolism of Prometheus, reaches that extreme overflow of the human soul with endless experiences, which is already a new stage in the modern European symbolism of Prometheus. Here we have the symbolism of a human personality passionately overflowing with experiences, when life and death are mixed in one universal chaos of individual self-assertion and exuberance.

Goethe's poem "Prometheus" dates back to 1774, where Prometheus is just about to sculpt people, anticipating their joys, torments and also independence from Zeus. Subsequently, in 1830, Goethe placed this ode in his drama Prometheus. Thus, the influence of Shaftesbury in the sense of his artistic and creative idea of Prometheus reached even the very last period of Goethe's work, although with very significant additions.

Herder wrote the whole drama Prometheus Unchained,54 which Herder himself called "scenes" (1802). The most important Aeschylus features of Prometheus are restored here. However, Prometheus' heroism is manifested not in his rebelliousness, but in the scholarship of a philosopher and thinker. This whole image is imbued with Herder's basic conviction in the gradual development of civilization, so that thanks to the patience of the gods, men, and Prometheus himself, what Herder calls pure humanity is established on earth. Prometheus is chained here not for stealing the heavenly fire for people, but for the purpose of the gradual development of humanity on earth. In the end, not only is Prometheus freed thanks to the high human feat of Hercules, but Zeus himself changes, (221) establishing justice throughout the world. Prometheus here is the liberator of people in the spiritual sense of the word.

At the same time, Herder understands the "humanity" of Prometheus very beautifully and even elegantly. In the quatrain "The Art of Prometheus", Herder emphasizes the importance of Prometheus for art. In the poem "The Altar of Mercy", Herder depicts the process of creating an ideal man by Prometheus in the image of the gods. All sorts of sublime qualities of man are depicted: his head is the palace of wisdom, his forehead is the temple of thought, reason shines in his gaze, Aurora plays on his cheeks and lips, Zephyr flows in his breath, but most of all Herder appreciates in this figure of man a heart full of love and mercy.

In the dramatic dialogue A Vision of the Future and a Vision of the Past,55 Herder depicts Prometheus as giving men foresight and Epimetheus as giving men an understanding of the past. Pallas Athena enters the conversation, proving that people need both, that they must, firstly, learn to forget (the principle of Promethean foresight) and "learn to remember" (the principle of the Epimethean vision of the past).

13. August and Friedrich Schlegel. Goethe. August Schlegel treats Prometheus in a similar way to Herder in his short poem of the same title, Prometheus (1797),56 which is preceded by an epigraph from Ovid: "He gave man the loftiness of his countenance, and made him look up at the sky and raise his head to the stars." The little poem begins with a description of the golden age of Kronos that has gone forever. However, after the rebellion of the Titans and their terrible war with Zeus, a general decline began on earth. Taking pity on man, Prometheus descends from Olympus to teach people to "act, create and endure." Since, however, desolation reigns on earth, Prometheus sculpts anew from "pure clay" a new man, proud and noble. To endow him with "sacred powers," he brings a spark from heaven. He who "mixes the high with the low" will face the wrath of the ruler of the universe; And people are doomed to suffering and unfulfilled desires. However, Prometheus believes in their dignity, hard work and creative power: "A person will shape himself and everything around him." The creative impulse intoxicates Prometheus himself, and even after hearing from his mother about the sad fate prepared for humanity, he does not lose courage. Then Themis predicts the rebellion of creation against Zeus and the suffering of Prometheus on the rock: "Zeus will severely punish you for "image-making" (Bildnerei). Prometheus agrees to endure this as well. In anticipation (222) of anguish and rapture, he turns to the image (Bild) of man created and liberated by him.

As for Prometheus as a symbol of the artist and creator, as a symbol of artistic creation, we found this motif in the interpretation of the thousand-year-old symbol in the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, already in Shaftesbury, already in Goethe, already in Herder. However, in a short poem by August Schlegel, we have in mind not only the artistic creation of human life, and moreover, a spiritual, free, independent and fearless life. Augustus Schlegel's Prometheus is well aware of all the endless sufferings that he and the humanity he created will have to endure. But he deeply believes in the ultimate triumph of beauty and goodness and is ready for any suffering. Here, of course, there is something new in comparison with the artistic creation in general that was meant in previous literature. The opposition of Herder's Prometheus and Prometheus in A. Schlegel to the French revolutionary ideas is striking by itself. Prometheus as a symbol here is not exactly reduced, but becomes the idea of a gradual, but not revolutionary, development of civilization. This moment in the concept of the symbol, which we have described above as decomposition into an infinite series, is not absent here (in contrast to the Enlightenment), but it does not express all the ideas of becoming embedded in Prometheus as a symbol in a sufficiently vivid form. The idea of the infinite in Goethe's drama is much more pronounced.

Herder and A. Schlegel are also opposed to Fr. Schlegel, who in his Lucinda (1799)57 allegorically depicts in Prometheus not a creator, but a mechanical worker of men with the help of glue and other materials, forcing himself and men to work aimlessly, senselessly, and dullly in a constant bustle, so that he will never free himself from his chains.