"Yea, I put eyes to see/ Into the face of fire, and gave to him/ A fount of vision that before was dim."

A few of my posts recently have noted men who were of the classicist scholar-warrior tradition. On a break today I read a review of John Lewis-Stempel's Six Weeks: The Short but Gallant Life of the British Officer in the Great War, from which I take another example of the typology. Apparently when the future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was seriously wounded at the Somme, where he was shot in the left thigh and pelvis, he took refuge in a shell hole for three days until rescued. Whilst there he read, in between bouts of unconsciousness, the pocket edition of the Greek text of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound he had been carrying in his tunic, a work he found 'not inappropriate to my position...' I've read elsewhere that it was actually only a day reading Aeschylus in a slit-trench, which I think only slightly diminishes the story.

I've taken the title from the play. These words of Prometheus make the claim that he was responsible for awakening man's higher instincts. I'm not sure it's the most appropriate extract of the play for this entry, but there's something about it that I like. The full passage is as follows:

"Fulfilment bear; I read the inward mind
Of the unintended word and the stray sign
Met by the road. . . .
Thus man to knowledge came of things to be,
Deep hid before. Yea, I put eyes to see
Into the face of fire, and gave to him
A fount of vision that before was dim."