Prometheus

Prometheus was a Titan, son of Iapetus, whose name means “Forethought”. In Hesiod he is the trickster who cheated Zeus over the sacrifice at Mecone and stole fire for mortals, and for this Zeus chained him and set an eagle to eat his liver each day. In later writers he is also the maker of the first men. Heracles, with the consent of Zeus, finally freed him (Hesiod, Theogony 507–616).

Prometheus' Biography

Prometheus' Family

In Hesiod, Iapetus took Clymene, daughter of Ocean, as his wife, and she bore Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus and Epimetheus (Theogony 507–511). Apollodorus gives the mother as Asia (Library 1.2.3), and in Aeschylus Prometheus calls his mother Themis, who is also Gaia, “one form with many names” (Prometheus Bound 209–213). So the sources do not agree on her name, and Clymene is the Hesiodic one.

Hesiod says Zeus struck the violent Menoetius with a thunderbolt and sent him down to Erebus, and that Atlas holds up the broad sky at the ends of the earth, near the Hesperides (Theogony 514–520). Prometheus’ son was Deucalion (Apollodorus, Library 1.7.2); Pyrrha, Deucalion’s wife, was the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora (Library 1.7.2).

Prometheus' Name

The name was understood in Greek as “forethought”. Aeschylus plays on it when Prometheus is told that the gods wrongly call him Prometheus, since he himself needs forethought to escape his torment (Prometheus Bound 85–87). Hesiod describes Prometheus as “crafty” and “of many counsels”, and calls his brother Epimetheus hamartinoos, “mistaken in mind”, a mischief to men from the beginning, because he was the first to accept the woman Zeus had formed (Theogony 510–514).

Titanomachy

Hesiod does not describe Prometheus in the war between the Titans and the Olympians. In Aeschylus he says that when the gods quarrelled and began to fight, he advised his fellow Titans to win by cunning rather than by force. They refused, and so he and his mother Themis went over to Zeus, and by his counsel Tartarus now holds Cronus and his allies (Prometheus Bound 199–221). In this version Zeus owed his victory partly to Prometheus.

Prometheus vs Zeus

Aeschylus gives the cause of the quarrel. Once Zeus had taken the throne and shared out honours among the gods, he took no account of wretched mortals and wanted to destroy the whole race and plant a new one; Prometheus alone opposed him (Prometheus Bound 228–236). In Hesiod the quarrel grows out of a trick over the sacrifice.

Prometheus and the Trick at Mecone

When gods and mortal men were being settled their rights at Mecone, Prometheus divided a great ox and set the portions before Zeus. In one he hid the flesh and the rich innards inside the ox’s stomach; in the other he arranged the white bones and covered them with shining fat. Zeus told him he had divided the portions very unfairly, and Prometheus smiled and invited him to choose. Zeus saw through the trick but, planning evil for mortals, took the fat-covered bones and was angry when he saw what lay underneath. This is why, Hesiod says, men on earth burn white bones on the fragrant altars for the immortals (Theogony 535–557).

Prometheus and the Stealing of Fire

In anger at the trick, Zeus withheld the power of unwearying fire from men. Prometheus, the noble son of Iapetus, deceived him by stealing the far-seen gleam of fire in a hollow fennel stalk (Theogony 562–569; Works and Days 47–52). Aeschylus has Prometheus describe the fennel stalk in the same way and call fire the teacher of every craft (Prometheus Bound 107–111), and in his play Hephaestus is the god told to bind him because the fire was his own “flower” (Prometheus Bound 7–8).

The Athenians kept a cult of Prometheus. Pausanias saw an altar of Prometheus in the Academy, from which men ran to the city carrying burning torches; the contest was to keep the torch alight, and a runner whose torch went out lost his place (Description of Greece 1.30.2).

Humankind’s Punishment

Pandora and Her Jar

Zeus answered the theft by having Hephaestus make, out of earth, the likeness of a modest maiden. Athena dressed her in silver-white clothing and an embroidered veil, and Hephaestus made her a golden crown. When she was brought out among gods and men, wonder seized all who saw this “sheer guile”, Hesiod says; from her comes the race of women, a great trouble for mortal men (Theogony 570–612). In Works and Days she is given the name Pandora, because each of the gods gave her a gift (Works and Days 59–82).

Prometheus had told his brother never to accept a gift from Zeus, but Epimetheus took the woman, and only afterwards understood his mistake (Works and Days 83–89). Before this, Hesiod says, men lived free of evils, hard toil and painful disease. Then the woman took the great lid off a jar (pithos) and scattered its contents; only Hope stayed inside under the rim (Works and Days 90–99). The jar is a storage vessel, not a box; the “box” comes from a later mistranslation and is not in Hesiod.

Prometheus’ Punishment

The Eagle

Zeus bound Prometheus with painful chains and drove them through a pillar, and set a long-winged eagle on him. It ate his immortal liver, and the liver grew back at night as much as the eagle ate during the day (Hesiod, Theogony 521–525). Apollodorus says Zeus ordered Hephaestus to nail him to the Caucasus, a Scythian mountain, where he was kept for many years (Library 1.7.1); Aeschylus opens his play on the same remote Scythian ground (Prometheus Bound 1–6).

Prometheus’ Secret

In Aeschylus, Prometheus knows that Zeus will one day make a marriage that will cast him from his throne, because the bride will bear a son stronger than his father. No one but Prometheus can tell Zeus how to avoid it, and he will not speak until he is released (Prometheus Bound 755–774, 907–927). The play does not name the bride. Apollodorus names her as Thetis: Zeus desired her, but Prometheus declared that her son would rule heaven (Library 3.13.5). He also records that Prometheus, or in another account Hephaestus, split open the head of Zeus with an axe so that Athena could leap out (Library 1.3.6).

Aeschylus also has Prometheus foretell to Io the course of her wanderings (Prometheus Bound 561–886).

The Freeing of Prometheus

Hesiod says that Heracles, the strong son of Alcmene, killed the eagle and freed the son of Iapetus from his suffering, not against the will of Zeus; Zeus honoured his son, so that the glory of Theban-born Heracles would grow greater, and laid aside the anger he had felt at being opposed by Prometheus (Theogony 526–534). Apollodorus sets the rescue on the Hesperides journey: Heracles shot on the Caucasus the eagle, born of Echidna and Typhon, and freed Prometheus (Library 2.5.11). In the same passage, as the Library has it, Prometheus told Heracles not to fetch the apples himself but to ask Atlas, and Heracles took the sky on his shoulders meanwhile. In another episode of the Library, the wounded Chiron longed to die but could not, being immortal; Prometheus offered himself to Zeus to be immortal in Chiron’s stead, and so Chiron died (Library 2.5.4).

Prometheus and Humankind

In Hesiod and in Aeschylus, Prometheus helps mankind but does not make it. The idea that he made the first men appears in later writers.

The Creation of Man by Prometheus

Apollodorus says that Prometheus “moulded men out of water and earth” and then gave them fire hidden in a fennel stalk (Library 1.7.1). Ovid also says that the son of Iapetus mixed earth with rain water and shaped it in the image of the gods who rule all things (Metamorphoses 1.82–83). In Lucian, Athena helps by breathing life into the clay figures (Lucian, A Literary Prometheus 3; compare Prometheus 13). In Plato’s Protagoras, the gods first formed mortal creatures from earth and fire inside the earth, and then set Prometheus and Epimetheus to give out their powers; Epimetheus used up the powers on the animals, and Prometheus stole the craft of Hephaestus and of Athena, with fire, and gave them to man (Plato, Protagoras 320c–322a).

Pausanias writes that at Panopeus in Phocis, beside a ravine, lie two stones, each big enough to fill a cart, of the colour of clay and smelling very like the skin of a man; people there said they were remains of the clay from which Prometheus had fashioned the whole human race (Description of Greece 10.4.4).

The Deluge: Prometheus’ Son Deucalion and Pyrrha

When Zeus wished to destroy the men of the Bronze Age, Deucalion, Prometheus’ son, built a chest on his father’s advice, and he and Pyrrha floated in it for nine days and nights until they landed on Parnassus. Zeus let Deucalion choose a wish, and he chose to have people. At Zeus’ command, the stones he threw over his head became men and the stones Pyrrha threw became women (Apollodorus, Library 1.7.2). Their son was Hellen, ancestor of the Hellenes.

Prometheus Sources

Hesiod, Theogony 507–616 and Works and Days 42–105; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 1–8, 85–87, 107–111, 199–236, 755–774, 907–927; Apollodorus, Library 1.2.3, 1.3.6, 1.7.1–2, 2.5.4, 2.5.11, 3.13.5; Plato, Protagoras 320c–322a; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.82–83; Lucian, A Literary Prometheus 3 and Prometheus 13; Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.4.4 and 1.30.2.

See Also: Creation of Man by Prometheus, Deucalion, Epimetheus, Iapetus, Pandora, Atlas, Heracles