Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 351)

Trigger Happy
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continued to improve the brutish lives of his creations
by teaching them writing, astronomy, agriculture,
sailing, medicine, mining and the interpretation of
dreams. He also fooled Zeus into accepting the worst
portion of meat from sacrificed animals: gristly bone
was the gods’ due, while men kept the edible flesh.
For these and other indiscretions, however,
Prometheus was punished. The malignant Zeus had him
chained to a rock, where a monstrous eagle gobbled at
his exposed liver every day for thirty thousand years. In
the Athenian drama usually attributed to Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound, the immortally pain-racked hero
sums up his story: “I gave a gift to mortals, and in that
giving yoked myself to fate—to this! I filled a hollow
reed with fire, stolen from heaven. I gave it to mortals.
It sparked them, taught them cunning, filled their need.
For that, now, I pay this price, chained, staked, wide
open to the sky.”
After an age of suffering, Prometheus was finally
freed when Hercules shot the eagle-monster with his
bow. From the surviving fragments of Aeschylus’s
sequel, it appears that Prometheus and Zeus were then
to enjoy something of a reconciliation. More than two
thousand years later, however, Shelley rewrote the
ending in Prometheus Unbound, where Prometheus,