as well as Milton's character of the Son in Paradise Lost. While Jesus or the Son sacrifices himself to save mankind, this act of sacrifice does nothing to overthrow the type of tyranny embodied, for Shelley, in the figure of God the Father. Prometheus resembles Jesus in that both uncompromisingly speak truth to power, and in how Prometheus overcomes his tyrant, Jupiter; Prometheus conquers Jupiter by "recalling" a curse Prometheus had made against Jupiter in a period before the play begins. The word "recall" in this sense means both to remember and to retract, and Prometheus, by forgiving Jupiter, removes Jupiter's power, which all along seems to have stemmed from his opponents' anger and will to violence. However, in Act I, Shelley relies on the Furies as the image of the crucifixion of Jesus. When Prometheus is tortured by the furies, Panthea describes Prometheus as "a youth/ With patient looks nailed to a crucifix." Soon after, Prometheus asks a fury "Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;/ Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow/ Stream not with blood" and "So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix". The regeneration of mankind and the world is symbolised by the union of Prometheus and Asia. To achieve this, Shelley relies on classical myth to draw upon the idea of Saturn's Golden Age, and then he combines it with the Biblical ideas of the fall and the millennium. Political Prometheus, then, is also Shelley's answer to the mistakes of the French Revolution and its cycle of replacing one tyrant with another. Shelley wished to show how a revolution could be conceived which would avoid doing just that, and in the end of this play, there is no power in charge at all; it is an anarchist's paradise. Shelley finishes his "Preface" to the play with an evocation of his intentions as a poet: My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. Essentially, Prometheus Unbound, as re-wrought in Shelley's hands, is a fiercely revolutionary text championing free will, goodness, hope and