The comparison of Eve to Pandora is too obvious to have escaped Milton, who introduces it in Book IV. of “Paradise-Lost”:
“More lovely than Pandora, whom the gods Endowed with all their gifts; and O, too like In sad event, when to the unwiser son Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she insnared Mankind with her fair looks, to be avenged On him who had stole Jove’s authentic fire.”
Prometheus and Epimetheus were sons of Iapetus, which Milton changes to Japhet.
Prometheus has been a favorite subject with the poets. He is represented as the friend of mankind, who interposed in their behalf when Jove was incensed against them, and who taught them civilization and the arts. But as, in so doing, he transgressed the will of Jupiter, he drew down on himself the anger of the ruler of gods and men. Jupiter had him chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where a vulture preyed on his liver, which was renewed as fast as devoured. This state of torment might have been brought to an end at any time by Prometheus, if he had been willing to submit to his oppressor; for he possessed a secret which involved the stability of Jove’s throne, and if he would have revealed it, he might have been at once taken into favor. But that he disdained to do. He has therefore become the symbol of magnanimous endurance of unmerited suffering, and strength of will resisting oppression.
Byron and Shelley have both treated this theme. The following are Byron’s lines:
“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.
“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. And, 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.”
Byron also employs the same allusion, in his “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte”:
“Or, like the thief of fire from heaven, Wilt thou withstand the shock? And share with him—the unforgiven— His vulture and his rock?”