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.

This original concept of Friedrich Schlegel needs to be understood precisely. In "Lucinda" there is a whole chapter under the characteristic title "The Idyll of Idleness". The author wants to prove that only idleness, that is, only freedom from all petty affairs, is the highest state of man, and that Prometheus prevents this.

"Greatness in tranquility," say the artists, "is the highest object of fine art; and, without being fully aware of it, I built and created our immortal essences in a similarly worthy style." "With extreme displeasure I now thought about bad people who would like to take sleep out of life. They evidently never slept and (223) never lived. For why are gods gods, if not because they consciously and intentionally do nothing, knowing a lot about it and showing skill in it?" "This empty and restless vanity is nothing but the disorder peculiar to the north and can cause nothing but boredom, one's own and others'." "Only in calm and peace, in the sacred silence of true passivity, can one remember one's self and surrender to the contemplation of the world and life."58 "In fact, it would not be so criminal to neglect the study of idleness, but it would be necessary to elevate it to an art, to a science, even to a religion! Embracing everything in one: the more divine a man or a human deed, the more they are likened to a plant; among all forms of nature, it is the most moral and the most beautiful. Thus the highest and most complete life would be nothing but pure growth."59 Thus, leaving aside the humorous terminology and deliberately ironic style of this kind of statement by Fr. Schlegel, it can be said that here the idea of the deepest calm and tranquility of the human spirit is put forward, which is devoid of all desires and all necessity of petty affairs and which values only complete concentration in itself. This is where it turns out that Prometheus is an obstacle to this. In his novel, Fr. Schlegel draws a whole scene where Prometheus appears in this very unsightly form.

It depicts Prometheus, who prepares people "with great haste and effort." Some young people are constantly urging him to work and castigating him for any delay. There is also glue and other tools of production, and immediately there is a fire in the brazier. On the other side of the stage is Hercules, who, although he always killed monsters, always had as his ideal "noble idleness", for which he is now taken to heaven and also lives idly among the Olympians. In contrast to Hercules, Prometheus is constantly working on the creation of people, and his people are petty, evil and have various passions that make them look like Satan. Hercules spends time in the sky in noble idleness. "This Prometheus, the inventor of education and enlightenment, is not at all like that. To him you owe the fact that you can never be calm and are in constant bustle; Hence the consequence is that you, even when you have nothing really to do, have a senseless effort to develop a character, or try to observe and justify the character of someone else. Such a beginning(224) is simply vile. But due to the fact that Prometheus seduced people to work, he now has to work himself, whether he wants it or not. He will still have enough of this boredom, and he will never free himself from his chains."60

What did Fr. Schlegel with such a symbolism of Prometheus? It is clear that here too the idea of artistic creation remains in the foreground. However, Fr. Schlegel wants to consider artistic creation, as well as human labor in general, with all the extremes that it contains. Perhaps artistic creativity that creates this or that joy instills this or that consolation in a person and gives him hope for a better future. But, according to Fr. Schlegel, it is also possible to create an artistic creation that is devoid of these joys, these hopes, and this inspiration, and is limited to the mechanical creation of works of the same type, capable of instilling only boredom and disgust and destroying that deepest self-sufficiency of the spirit concentrated in itself, which, it seemed, and should have become the true object and task of all creativity. Let us recall that we encounter the same kind of criticism of Prometheus in the Roman literature of Fr. Schlegel does not at all deny that artistic creation is capable of leading us to blissful self-sufficiency. But he warns that creativity of the opposite nature is also possible. Thus, we would not say that the symbolism of Prometheus in Fr. Schlegel contradicts the artistic interpretation of it that went back to Shaftesbury. But it essentially clarifies this typically modern European symbolism of Prometheus.

Nor is there any rebelliousness or revolution in Goethe's Pandora (1808), where the too practical Prometheus is contrasted with his aesthetically enthusiastic brother Epimetheus, who in the ancient tradition was famous for his narrow-mindedness, if not outright stupidity. In this work of Goethe, which also remained unfinished, the reconciliation of the practical technique of Prometheus and the aesthetic delights of Epimetheus is preached. The symbolic essence of the image of Prometheus is also undoubtedly present here, but the infinite distances of symbolism are interpreted in the spirit of conciliation of the later Goethe.

Prometheus in this later Goethe knows well that the people created by him grasp at every new trifle, forget the old and cannot unite the past and the present into one single whole. He does not like this, but he considers the instructions of people in this sense to be vain and ineffective.62