Prometheus

Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refus'd thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine--and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself--and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter'd recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.

Son of Iapetus and known for his wisdom. He and his brother Epimetheus were asked by Zeus to create the animals and mankind. After his brother had given all the gifts away and left none for man, Prometheus decided to trick Zeus into taking the lesser animals as sacrifices and leaving the best to men.

To punish man, Zeus took away fire. So Prometheus stole fire from Hephaestus' forge in Olympus to return to man. As punishment, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock and left an eagle to torment him forever.

To punish man for stealing fire, Zeus created Pandora, the first woman and root of all evil to be released on Earth.

Prometheus was freed by Hercules and became immortal with the help of the Centaur Chiron.

The tree now is gone, although a forlorn stump still stares at the desert sky. The oldest surving tree, Methuseleah, is now a youthful 4767 years old. Promethius is now dead, a monument to the fact that even biologists, people who pledge to study the world with a sense of wonder and respect for all life, sometimes do horrifying things

Discovered by            S. A. Collins, D. Carlson
Date of Discovery        1980
Distance from Saturn     139,353 km
Radius                   74.0 × 50.0 × 34.0 km
Mass                     ???
Orbital Eccentricity     0.003
Orbital Inclination      0.0°
Orbital Period           0.6130 day
Rotational Period        ???
Density (gm/cm3)         ???

This strange moon is shaped like an American football. Performing the shepherding function on the inner side of Saturn's F ring, along with Pandora on the outer side, Prometheus has a low density, which probably means it is composed largely of ice and may be quite porous.

Like Pandora, not much else is known about Prometheus. It was discovered through imagery from Voyager 1.

Sources:
NASA.gov
space.com

Pro*me"the*us (?), n. [L., fr. Gr. , from to have forethought for.] Class. Myth.

The son of Iapetus (one of the Titans) and Clymene, fabled by the poets to have surpassed all mankind in knowledge, and to have formed men of clay to whom he gave life by means of fire stolen from heaven. Jupiter, being angry at this, sent Mercury to bind Prometheus to Mount Caucasus, where a vulture preyed upon his liver.

© Webster 1913.