What Is the Story of Prometheus? Fire, Punishment and the Gift to Humanity

Prometheus was one of the Titans, the generation of gods before Zeus, but when Zeus overthrew his father Cronus, Prometheus foresaw the outcome and joined the winning side. His name means forethought, and his brother Epimetheus, afterthought, is his opposite in everything. In one tradition Prometheus made the first humans himself, shaping them from clay and water, and in every tradition he was their champion against a Zeus who regarded them with indifference at best.

The trouble began at a sacrifice at Mekone, where gods and mortals were to settle how the meat of offerings would be divided. Prometheus made two piles: the bones wrapped in glistening fat, and the good meat hidden inside an ox's stomach. Zeus chose the fat-covered pile, found the bones, and from then on humans kept the meat of their sacrifices and burned the bones for the gods. Hesiod, who tells the story, adds that Zeus saw through the trick and chose the bones anyway, to have his grievance.

In his anger Zeus withheld fire from humans, and without it they could not cook, work metal or survive the winter. Prometheus stole it back, carrying a glowing ember down from Olympus hidden in the hollow stalk of a giant fennel plant, and gave it to mankind. Fire in the story stands for more than warmth; it is the beginning of every craft, and in Aeschylus's version Prometheus lists what he taught alongside it: building, astronomy, number, writing, the taming of animals, ships, medicine and the reading of omens. Before him, he says, humans saw without seeing and heard without understanding.

Zeus's revenge came in two parts. For humans he ordered the making of Pandora, the first woman, sent to Epimetheus with the jar whose opening loosed sickness and toil on the world. For Prometheus he ordered the rock and the eagle.

Prometheus was bound to a mountain in the Caucasus with unbreakable chains, and each day Zeus's eagle tore out his liver, the organ the Greeks took to be the seat of the passions, which regrew each night because he was immortal. The torment lasted, depending on the teller, for thirty years or thirty thousand. It ended when Heracles, on his way to fetch the golden apples, shot the eagle and broke the chains, with Zeus's tacit consent, since the hero's glory reflected on his father.

There was a second reason for the release. Prometheus knew a secret: that a certain goddess was fated to bear a son greater than his father, and that if Zeus lay with her he would be overthrown as he had overthrown Cronus. The knowledge was his bargaining chip through all the years on the rock, and when he finally gave it up the goddess, Thetis, was married off to a mortal, and the son she bore was Achilles. The main versions differ in emphasis:

• •Hesiod, eighth century BC: Prometheus is a trickster whose theft brings Pandora and the end of an easy age; the moral is that Zeus cannot be cheated
• •Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, fifth century BC: Prometheus is a defiant benefactor and Zeus a new tyrant; the moral is that power without wisdom is brutal
• •Plato, Protagoras: Prometheus gives humans the crafts but not political skill, which Zeus must later supply
• •Ovid and the Romans: the focus shifts to Prometheus as the maker of humanity from clay

Aeschylus's Prometheus, chained and unrepentant, telling the messenger of the gods that he would not exchange his suffering for servitude, became the Western image of the rebel against unjust authority. The Romantics adopted him: Goethe wrote a poem in his voice, Shelley a play in which he is finally freed and Zeus falls, and Mary Shelley subtitled Frankenstein The Modern Prometheus, making the scientist who creates life the Titan's heir and his creature the cost. Beethoven wrote a ballet about him; Marx called him the noblest saint in the philosophical calendar.

The name has since attached to anything that takes divine or dangerous power into human hands. The first hydrogen bomb test was followed by a book titled American Prometheus about the physicist who led it, and the metaphor of stolen fire hangs over every debate about a technology that gives more than it was meant to.

Prometheus, the Titan whose name means forethought, tricked Zeus over the division of sacrifices, stole fire for humanity in a fennel stalk and was chained to a rock where an eagle ate his regrowing liver until Heracles freed him. Hesiod told it as a warning against cheating the gods and Aeschylus as a defiance of tyranny, and the second reading made him the enduring symbol of knowledge taken at a price.