a dream" so that they saw it all in a sort of confused blur, much, perhaps, as Aeschylus imagined animals perceived the world (449). They lived as animals as well since they "could not brick / their houses to oppose the sun, nor work in wood, / but like a boiling swarm of ants beneath the ground / they holed as deep in sunless caves as they could dig" (450-53). Prometheus transformed this suffering mass by giving them everything they needed to achieve the freedom of fully functioning human beings: numbers, writing, sail boats, the domestication of animals, medicines, and access to the gold and silver locked in the earth. In giving humanity all these things Prometheus truly became the founder of human technology.
In opposing this, however, Zeus did not offer arguments about man's inability to handle these gifts but about the appropriateness of Prometheus
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