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 physicist who led the building of the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, is the subject of a biography titled American Prometheus, and the metaphor of stolen fire hangs over every debate about a technology that gives more than it was meant to.

The Greeks were far from alone in telling a story about how people first got fire, and many cultures describe it as something taken rather than given. In Maori tradition the trickster Maui goes to his fire-goddess ancestor Mahuika and tricks her into giving up her burning fingernails one after another, until she loses her temper. In a Cherokee story recorded in the nineteenth century, the animals try in turn to fetch fire from a burning tree on an island, and only the little water spider succeeds, carrying a coal home in a bowl woven on her back.

These stories share a sense that fire was powerful, dangerous and once out of human reach, which fits what archaeologists find. Evidence of burnt bone and ash in caves shows early humans using fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, though exactly when people learned to make and control it at will is still debated. Even the Greek detail of the fennel stalk has a practical logic: the dry pith inside giant fennel burns slowly, which would make it a plausible way to carry a smouldering ember. Myth and archaeology agree that fire was the first great human technology.

The detail of the regrowing liver has a curious echo in modern medicine. The liver is the one internal organ in the human body that can rebuild most of its lost mass. If a surgeon removes up to about two thirds of a healthy liver, the remaining cells start dividing, and within weeks to a few months the organ has grown back to close to its original size and function, though not its exact original shape. This is what makes living-donor transplants possible: a healthy adult gives part of their liver to a patient, and both pieces grow into full working organs.

Whether the Greeks knew any of this is uncertain, and historians of medicine disagree. Some suggest they could have noticed the liver's power to heal in wounded soldiers or in animals, since diviners examined the livers of sacrificed beasts to read omens and knew the organ intimately. Others think the choice was symbolic, the liver being the largest internal organ in the body and closely tied in Greek thought to life and feeling. Either way, the myth runs on a different timescale from the body: an immortal's liver regrows in a single night, a mortal's over many weeks, and only after part of it, never the whole, is lost.

The best known ancient telling of the punishment is the tragedy Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus, although some scholars doubt he wrote it. It shows Prometheus chained to a rock, defiant, refusing to reveal a secret that threatens Zeus's rule. It was one play in a group, and its companion pieces, including one about his release, survive only in fragments.

The missing sequel left later writers free to imagine the ending. Percy Bysshe Shelley published his own Prometheus Unbound in 1820, in which Prometheus is freed without submitting to Zeus at all, turning the Titan into a hero of liberty against tyranny. That reworking shows how the gaps left by lost ancient texts have often been filled by the hopes of later ages.

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.