Prometheus: The Fire-Thief File

Open the drawer marked Prometheus and the first thing you notice is the thickness of the file. Few figures were taken up by so many writers who wanted such different things from him. A Boeotian farmer-poet used him to explain why life is hard. A tragedian made him a prisoner who refuses to bend. A philosopher cast him as a minor supplier in an argument about whether justice can be taught. Later handbooks put a lump of wet clay in his hands. The stolen fire runs through nearly every card, but almost everything around it shifts. Below, the file is laid out source by source, with the disagreements left in.

Card 1: Hesiod and the bargain at Mecone

The oldest records are two poems of Hesiod, composed around 700 BCE. In the Theogony, Prometheus is the son of the Titan Iapetus and Clymene, a daughter of Ocean; his brothers are Atlas, Menoetius and Epimetheus. Ancient readers heard his name as “Forethought” and his brother’s as “Afterthought”, and Hesiod plays the pair against each other.

The trouble starts at Mecone, where gods and mortals are settling their shares. Prometheus butchers an ox and lays out two portions: the meat and rich innards hidden inside an unappetizing stomach, and the bare bones wrapped in glistening fat. Zeus takes the fat. Hesiod insists that Zeus saw through the trick and chose anyway, but the outcome is fixed for all time: people keep the meat and burn the bones for the gods.

Zeus answers by withholding fire. Prometheus steals it back.

But the brave son of Iapetus outwitted him: he stole the far-seen gleam of tireless fire inside a hollow fennel stalk.

Hesiod, Theogony (our rendering)

The fennel stalk, narthex, is a practical detail: its dry pith smoulders slowly, so an ember can travel inside it. Zeus’s counter-move is a woman, shaped from earth by Hephaestus and dressed by Athena. In the Theogony she has no name; she is a “beautiful evil”. In Works and Days she is Pandora, and she lifts the lid of a storage jar, a pithos, releasing troubles into the world while Hope stays trapped under the rim. The familiar box is a much later slip, usually blamed on Erasmus in the sixteenth century. Prometheus himself is bound with chains driven through a pillar, and an eagle eats his immortal liver by day while it grows back by night. Heracles kills the bird, and Hesiod notes that Zeus allowed it so that his son’s fame would grow. The lesson Hesiod draws is blunt: no one gets past the mind of Zeus.

Card 2: The tragedy and the inventory of gifts

The play Prometheus Bound comes down to us under Aeschylus’s name, though many scholars doubt he wrote it, and its date is uncertain. Its Prometheus is a different creature. His mother is now Themis, whom the play identifies with Earth, and from her he learned the future. He helped Zeus win the war against the Titans, then defied him when Zeus planned to wipe out humankind and breed a new race.

The play opens on a desolate crag in Scythia, at the edge of the world, where Hephaestus pins him to the rock under the eyes of Might and Force. What follows is a long refusal. Prometheus will not apologize, and he holds a secret Zeus needs: a certain marriage would produce a son stronger than his father. Later tradition names the bride as the sea-nymph Thetis.

The play’s most famous speech is an inventory. Fire, Prometheus says, was only the beginning. He taught humans to build houses instead of living in caves, to read the risings and settings of stars, to count and to write, to yoke animals and sail ships, to mix medicines, to interpret omens and to dig metal from the ground. Every art mortals possess, he sums up, comes from Prometheus. Earlier he names two quieter gifts: he stopped people foreseeing the day of their death, and he planted “blind hopes” in them instead. Set that beside Hesiod’s jar, where Hope is shut in with the evils, and the two files disagree on whether hope is a mercy or a leftover.

A sequel, Prometheus Unbound, now in fragments, brought his release. Athens itself honoured him as a patron of craft: Pausanias saw his altar in the Academy, where a torch race into the city began.

Card 3: Plato’s distribution problem

The oddest card in the file is in Plato’s Protagoras, where the sophist tells a story to show that civic virtue can be taught. Once, he says, there were gods but no mortal creatures. The gods moulded the animals inside the earth from a blend of earth and fire, then told Prometheus and Epimetheus to equip each kind before bringing them into the light.

Epimetheus begs to do the job alone, with his brother checking afterwards. He works from a balance sheet: speed for the weak, size for the slow, wings or burrows for the small, many offspring for the hunted. Then he runs out. When Prometheus arrives to inspect, he finds humans “naked, unshod, unbedded and unarmed” (our rendering), and the day of their emergence already at hand.

His solution is theft. He slips into the workshop that Athena and Hephaestus share and takes skill in the crafts together with fire, since skill without fire would be useless. What he cannot reach is political wisdom, kept in the citadel of Zeus behind fearsome guards. So humans can build, pray and speak, but cannot live together; their first cities collapse. Zeus, fearing for the species, sends Hermes with aidōs (respect, a sense of shame) and dikē (justice), with orders to give them to everyone rather than to a few specialists. As for Prometheus, Protagoras adds only that he was later prosecuted for theft, “as the story goes”.

Plato’s version flips the moral weight. The Titan supplies the tools; the gift that lets humans live together comes from Zeus.

Card 4: The figure of clay

Neither Hesiod nor the tragedy says that Prometheus made humans. Apollodorus, in the Library, states it in a single line: Prometheus shaped people from water and earth and gave them fire hidden in fennel. Zeus then has Hephaestus nail him to the Caucasus, the eagle arrives, and Heracles eventually shoots it. The handbook also gives him a son, Deucalion, who survives the great flood with his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, so the human race after the flood descends from both brothers.

Ovid, opening the Metamorphoses, declines to choose. Perhaps the maker of the world created humans from divine seed, or perhaps the son of Iapetus mixed new earth, which still held seeds of the sky it had just been parted from, with rainwater and shaped it in the image of the gods. Ovid’s detail is posture: other animals look down at the ground, but this figure was made to stand upright and lift its face to the stars.

Cross-check: what holds and what moves

Laid side by side, the cards agree on a short list: fire was taken against the will of Zeus, it travelled in a fennel stalk, Prometheus was bound for it, and Heracles helped end the torment. Nearly everything else moves. His mother is Clymene in Hesiod, Themis in the tragedy, and another Oceanid, Asia, in Apollodorus. The binding happens at an unnamed pillar, in Scythia, or on the Caucasus. Humans are made by nobody in particular, by the gods, or by Prometheus himself. Zeus is just, tyrannical or provident, depending on who holds the pen.

That instability is the useful part: each author used Prometheus to argue about the price of technology and who should control it. For another maker whose skill outran his luck, open the Daedalus file; for a founder of rites rather than crafts, see Orpheus. Prometheus, Iapetus, Clymene and the rest of the family are numbered in the Catalogue.