Prometheus

What it is

Prometheus belongs to Greek mythology as one of the Titans, the divine generation older than the Olympians. He is remembered as a friend to people: in several tellings he moulds the first humans out of clay, and he is usually credited with bringing them fire after the gods had kept it back. Intelligence is his mark, and he is treated as the origin of human crafts and sciences. Some accounts make him the father of Deucalion, the hero who survives the flood. Certain versions put his suffering in the Caucasus, at Mount Elbrus or Mount Kazbek, the volcanic peaks beyond which the ancient Greeks placed the lands of the barbari, their word for outsiders.

Where it comes from

The earliest written account is in Hesiod's Theogony, from the late 8th century BC. Tales of a trickster who steals fire appear in many parts of the world, and parts of this story have been compared with the Sumerian myth of Enki, later called Ea, a civilising god who sided with humanity and shaped a man from clay. A 19th-century idea that Prometheus came from the Vedic fire bringer Mātariśvan lost ground in the 20th century, though some still hold it. A lost epic, the Titanomachy, may lie behind versions that Hesiod does not give; M. L. West argued that it cannot be earlier than the late 7th century BC. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BC, proposed that Prometheus invented the fire-sticks.

How it is done

The story turns on two deceptions. At Mecone, a sacrificial meal that fixed the terms between mortals and gods, Prometheus set two portions before Zeus: good beef concealed inside an ox's stomach, and bones dressed in fat. Zeus took the fat, and so humans kept the meat while bones went to the gods as offerings. Angered, Zeus withheld fire. Prometheus carried a flame away in a fennel stalk and returned it to people. His punishment followed: chained to a rock, he had his liver eaten daily by an eagle, a bird of Zeus, and the organ grew back each night. Heracles later killed the eagle, with Zeus's consent, and set him free.

Tools and materials

Two objects carry the tale: an ox's stomach and a layer of fat, used to disguise the portions at Mecone, and a fennel stalk, a hollow plant stem in which fire could be carried. Chains and a rock belong to the punishment, and the eagle is Zeus's instrument and emblem. Diodorus Siculus tied the name to the fire-drill, a device of two pieces of wood rubbed together to make flame. The Greeks located the emotions in the liver, which gives the daily eating of that organ its force in the story.

What it is for

The myth explains several things at once. It accounts for why sacrifice in ancient Greek religion took the form it did, with burnt bones for the gods and meat kept by the household. It accounts for the possession of fire and of the crafts that go with it. In Aeschylus, Prometheus says he taught people writing, number, farming, medicine and science, and that he stopped Zeus from wiping out the human race. The story also carries a warning about overreach: a helper who defies the ruling power pays for it. Later readers took it as a picture of human striving and its cost.

Who does it

Evidence of a cult of Prometheus is thin. Religious activity centred mainly on Athens, where he was honoured in the company of Athena and Hephaestus, the gods of craft and technology. There he is described as gaining a semi-divine standing as an advocate for humanity. Hesychius of Alexandria records the variant names Ithas and Ithax and calls him Herald of the Titans. Beyond Athens the record is mostly literary: Aeschylus and Plato are the two authors who most shaped the Athenian telling, one through tragedy, the other through philosophical dialogue.

Peoples and places

The myth is Greek, and its main setting in cult is Athens. Hesiod's version names his parents as the Titan Iapetus and Clymene or Asia, one of the Oceanids, and his brothers as Atlas, Menoetius and Epimetheus. Some tellings place his ordeal in the Caucasus, at Mount Elbrus or Mount Kazbek. Comparisons have been drawn outward: with Sumerian Enki or Ea, and with the Vedic Mātariśvan. Angelo Casanova reads the figure as a pre-Hesiodic trickster, and finds the shaping of humans from clay to be an eastern motif known from Enuma Elish.

What people believe

The world of the story is one of rival divine powers. Zeus rules as king of the Olympians, and Prometheus, a Titan, stands outside that order while knowing its weak point: his mother Themis, identified in Aeschylus with Gaia, told him of a marriage that would produce a son to overthrow Zeus. That secret is what finally reconciles them. Sacrifice works as a bargain between gods and people, with portions divided. In Hesiod's later telling, Zeus sends Pandora, and the jar she carries releases sickness and sorrow; hope stays inside because the lid is closed first.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Classical scholars read the figure in several ways. Casanova sees a trickster older than Hesiod, one that explains why human life holds both good and bad. Karl-Martin Dietz takes Prometheus in Hesiod as a sign of humanity falling from fellowship with the gods into its present troubles. M. L. West weighed the lost Titanomachy as a possible source of details absent from Hesiod, especially those found in Aeschylus. Kerényi finds the names Ithas and Ithax opaque and possibly variant readings of one name, while Prometheus itself is descriptive.

Compare and confuse

Fire theft by a trickster is a story found well beyond Greece. The Sumerian Enki, called Ea in Babylonian texts, plays a similar part as a civilising helper who shields people from other gods and shapes a human from clay. The Vedic Mātariśvan has been proposed as a relative, an idea popular in the 19th century and less so later. Closer to home, his brother Epimetheus carries the opposite name, "afterthought" to his "forethought", and the two variant names Ithas and Ithax attach to him alone.

Today

In the Western classical tradition Prometheus became a symbol of human striving, above all the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and of the risk of acting as a god. The Romantic era read him as a lone genius whose improvements might end in disaster. Mary Shelley reflected this when she gave Frankenstein the subtitle The Modern Prometheus in 1818. The punishment scene has stayed a subject for art and later culture, and a black-figure cup in the Vatican Museums, painted around 560 to 550 BC, shows the eagle at work.

Questions people ask about Prometheus

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle

• Prometheus on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data