Prometheus and Epimetheus were brothers. They were the titans that crafted all the things that walk, fly, swim, or creep upon the earth. They were given a mass of clay and a pile of gifts and told to complete this task. Epimetheus started throwing things together, weird amalgamations, and grabbing gifts from the pile without consideration. Prometheus, contrariwise, spent all his time carefully crafting humanity (after the model of the titans and olympians?) and when he was done, he found the pile of gifts exhausted. His only recourse was to steal fire from the gods to give as a gift, and for this he was punished. But this isn’t his story. This is the story of one Victor Frankenstein. Victor, like Prometheus to whom he is compared, crafts a single being, formed like himself (though he recoils and flees at seeing its ugliness; perhaps there is an element of a moral mirror that reveals to him something about himself he dare not face). He, unlike Prometheus, gives his creation no gifts, stealing nothing from the gods but the right to make life at all. And like Prometheus, he is punished, but by his creation, not by the gods themselves. So how, then, is he the Modern Prometheus in any way except “crafting a human”? I will argue that his similarity is in his lack of foresight. “Prometheus” means “foresight”, and the name carries some irony when you consider that the titan neither planned ahead for what gifts to give his creation, nor whether there would even be any left to give, nor what to do if the gifts were all allocated. Perhaps he knew what would happen to him when he stole fire, and deemed it worthwhile, but even if so, his foresight availed him less than Epimetheus (“hindsight”) gained from YOLOing his way through his divinely ordained task. It almost seems more true to say that these are both stories about how perfectionism and over-weening ambition will inevitably lead to failure. I would suggest that it is less that the creature is physically ugly, or ugly as some kind of moral mirror, and more that Frankenstein himself is incapable of seeing the beauty in his own creation, being so addicted to the vision that was in his head before he began the project. That both he and Prometheus actually lack _hindsight_ to see what they have made, truly and fully. (Of course, we cannot fail to mention that there is an irony in _Victor’s_ name, too. If he does achieve victory in his story, it is only an eventual moral victory, wherein the creature comes to seek some absolution for his actions. I would call that tenuous at best.)