Prometheus and the gift of fire

Prometheus smuggled fire to humans inside the hollow stalk of a giant fennel plant.

A Titan on the side of humans

Prometheus was the son of the Titan Iapetos and the ocean nymph Klymene, so he belonged to the older generation that Zeus had defeated. His brothers were Atlas, who was made to hold up the sky, Menoitios, whom Zeus struck down, and Epimetheus. The names are usually explained as "forethought" for Prometheus and "afterthought" for Epimetheus, and the stories play on that difference: one brother plans ahead, the other realises his mistake too late. Prometheus is clever and does not fight Zeus with weapons. He fights with tricks, and almost always for the benefit of human beings.

The trick at Mecone

Hesiod tells of Prometheus twice, in the Theogony and in Works and Days. The Theogony version begins at a place called Mecone, where gods and mortals met to settle how sacrifices should be shared. Prometheus killed a great ox and divided it into two portions. In one he put the meat and the rich inner parts, wrapped in the ox’s stomach so that it looked unappetising. In the other he arranged the bare white bones and covered them with shining fat so that they looked like the better share. Then he asked Zeus to choose.

Zeus chose the fat-covered bones. Hesiod, who is careful to make Zeus look wise, says that Zeus saw through the trick and chose the bones on purpose, so that he would have a reason to punish humans. Many readers suspect that in older versions Zeus was simply fooled. Either way, the story explains a real Greek custom. At a sacrifice, people burned the thigh bones wrapped in fat for the gods on the altar and ate the meat themselves at a feast. The myth turns that everyday practice into the result of a single clever deception.

Chained to a rock

The punishment for humans was the first woman, the subject of the next unit. The punishment for Prometheus was to be bound with unbreakable chains to a pillar or rock. Every day an eagle came and ate his liver, and every night the liver grew back as much as the bird had eaten. Later writers placed the rock in the Caucasus mountains. Hesiod says that Heracles, son of Zeus, killed the eagle and freed Prometheus from this torment, with Zeus allowing it so that his son’s fame would grow. Yet a few lines later he says Prometheus is still held in chains, and scholars still argue about whether the Theogony means that he was released.

Later versions

Later writers gave Prometheus a bigger role. The Athenian tragedy Prometheus Bound, traditionally credited to Aeschylus in the 5th century BCE (some scholars doubt he wrote it), shows him chained and defiant, listing the arts he taught humans: building houses, counting, writing, taming animals, sailing and medicine. The handbook known as Apollodorus’s Library, usually dated to the 1st or 2nd century CE, says Prometheus shaped the first humans from water and earth, a detail that Hesiod does not give. In 1818 Mary Shelley subtitled her novel Frankenstein "The Modern Prometheus", using the old Titan as a model for a maker who goes too far.