From Santa Claus to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from Uncle Sam to Uncle Tom, here is a compelling, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining compendium of fictional trendsetters and world-shakers who have helped shape our culture and our lives. The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived offers fascinating histories of our most beloved, hated, feared, and revered invented icons and the indelible marks they made on civilization, including:
# 28: Rosie the Riveter, the buff, blue-collar factory worker who helped jump-start the Women's Liberation movement
# 7: Siegfried, the legendary warrior-hero of Teutonic nationalism responsible for propelling Germany into two world wars
# 80: Icarus, the headstrong high-flyer who inspired the Wright brothers and humankind's dreams of defying gravity . . . while demonstrating the pressing need for flight insurance
# 58: Saint Valentine, the hapless, de-canonized loser who lost his heart and head at about the same time
# 43: BarbiE, the bodacious plastic babe who became a role model for millions of little girls, setting an impossible standard for beauty and style
The gods we know best are the ones passed down to us in Greek and Roman stories. But what has made these deities so interesting for so long? The Greek god Dionysus invented wine, quite an impressive accomplishment to some people. But others were more impressed by the sobering, palpable presence of the gods in their everyday lives. They were not just the gods behind the forces of nature; they were the very forces themselves.
These gods lived full lives of intellect, temperament, and emotion. They exhibited vanity and jealousy; they engaged in love and war. While other cultures' gods were snakes or bulls, the Greek and Roman gods looked human and, much of the time, acted like humans. They married, had children, and battled among themselves. They had favorites among us mortals: people whom they met, spoke to, helped, or cursed. And many human women bore children by them. These offspring were demigods who often became heroes in their own right.
Are these gods and heroes fictional? That's the wrong question. Myth is a seductive, poetic enterprise by which we express our deepest wishes, as well as our most profound anxieties. In this chapter, we visit these gods and examine their influence on how we resolve moral issues today. The beauty of these stories can only be realized when the characters remain where they belong, neither in the world of truth nor the realm of fiction, but beyond the world of reason.
Prometheus—#46
Prometheus is the god who created man, a claim he shares with dozens of other deities. But he also brought man the essential gift of fire, which is more than we can say for Yahweh, Allah, or any other Western divinity.
Prometheus, whose name means "to think before acting," was a god to both the ancient Greeks and Romans, and his history has grown under the pens of such writers as Hesiod, Apollodorus, and Ovid.
Prometheus was the son of the Titan Iapetus and a nymph, Clymene. Even though he was a Titan on his father's side, he sided with Zeus during the war in which the Olympic gods defeated the Titans. Following this, Zeus, the chief Olympian god, rewarded him with the task of creating humans. Prometheus did this from earth and water and then had the goddess Athena breathe life into them.
But Prometheus secretly held a grudge against Zeus and the other Olympians for destroying his race of Titans. And he always sided with humans against the gods.
When Zeus decreed that man must share with the gods each animal the humans sacrificed, Prometheus decided to trick Zeus. After a sacrifice to Mecone, Prometheus cut up the bull and hid the desirable parts under the hide and the undesirable bare bones under a layer of rich fat. Then he told Zeus to choose for all time which he wanted and which would go to the humans. Zeus, the glutton, chose the fat. When he realized that he had been tricked, he withheld fire from humans as a punishment. But Prometheus went up to Olympus and stole some burning nuggets from the sun. He brought them to earth hidden in a stalk of fennel and thus delivered fire to mankind. After man had fire, Prometheus taught them architecture, mathematics, medicine, and metallurgy. Again, Zeus became angry with Prometheus. By teaching men all of these skills, Prometheus's pets were approaching the status of the gods.
This time Zeus decided to punish Prometheus directly. He had his servants, Force and Violence, seize Prometheus, take him to the Caucasus Mountains, and chain him naked to a rock. There a giant eagle tore at his liver during the day; because Prometheus was immortal, his liver grew back during the night.
Allan Lazar is a graduate of Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia and did postgraduate work at the University of Chicago, where he was also a member of the faculty. He has also served on the faculty of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons as well as Fairleigh Dickinson University Dental School. In his retirement he teaches at the Institute for Learning in Retirement at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey, and in his spare time teaches dogs to play the piano and sing.Dan Karlan originally trained at MIT to be a biochemistry researcher, but after several years changed careers to computer programming. He combined his expertise in programming and science to establish a career as a scientific computer programmer and technical writer. His favorite authors include Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Larry Niven, and Poul Anderson.Jeremy Salter was born in New York City, grew up in Long Branch, New Jersey, and got a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from Monmouth College. He worked in the drug industry as an analytical chemist, learning instrument repair and teaching electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, and chromatography. He left the industry in 2002 and studied writing at the feet of Allan Lazar and his dog, Yogi.
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