Mary Shelley evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the "grim terrors" of her "waking dream", her ghost story: She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus", published in 1818. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I
Prometheus the Fire-Bringer and then frees the Titan from his chains. Only a single line of dialogue survives from "Fire-Bringer": "Quiet, where need is; and talking to the point." This fragment is preserved in "Noctes Atticae" by the Roman scholar Aulus Gellius. Additionally, according to a scholium at line 94 of "Prometheus Bound", the Titan claims in "Fire-Bringer" that he had been bound for "thrice ten thousand years." Despite the paucity of direct evidence, Prometheus' foreshadowing of future events in the trilogy's first play suggests that the final play concerned itself with Prometheus' knowledge of a secret that could potentially lead to Zeus's