NONFICTION - Nov. 21, 1993

LEGACIES: Prometheus, Orpheus, Socrates by Joan M. Erikson (W.W. Norton: $22.95; 193 pp.). One of the great attractions of mythological stories is that they explain--and sometimes explain away--things we don’t understand. In Greek myth evil came from Pandora’s box, for instance, while knowledge, according to the Bible, came from an apple in the Garden of Eden: and both evil and knowledge were released when man failed to heed divine warnings. Joan M. Erikson obviously knows all about the social functions of myth, but in this book she uses myth in a much more inspirational-- and unsettling--way. She provides some new insights while retelling the stories of Prometheus, Orpheus, and Socrates--that in “Prometheus Bound,” to cite one example, Aeschylus put much greater emphasis on the god’s giving hope to man than on his giving man fire--but the book is damaged beyond recovery by her dubious re- interpretations. Though only the first third of Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy survives, for example, Erikson--treading where few mythologists dare go--sketches her own ending . . . one in which Prometheus unintentionally becomes a parodic figure, suggesting as he does that Hercules should have put the Nemean lion in a zoo instead of killing him (not to mention the vulture eating Prometheus’ liver). In the last few pages of “Legacies,” Erikson invites women to “gather their pent-up energies and hum like the chorus” in her own version of “Prometheus Unbound,” but only the most credulous readers will heed the call.