Prometheus

Prometheus was born to the Titan Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene, one of the daughters of the great river Oceanus that encircled the world. His brothers were Atlas, who would later be condemned to hold up the heavens, Menoetius, who was struck down by Zeus's thunderbolt for his arrogance, and Epimetheus, whose name means afterthought, a brother who acted first and thought later. Prometheus alone bore the name forethinker, and it suited him. When the young Olympian gods rose up against the older generation of Titans in the war called the Titanomachy, Prometheus did not fight alongside his fellow Titans. He saw the future more clearly than they did, and he allied himself with Zeus, the king of the gods who ruled with his thunderbolt. Prometheus's counsel helped the Olympians win the war, and when the Titans fell, he was spared the punishments that befell his kin. He was allowed to remain free, a rare mercy for one of the old gods, and he took his place among the immortals of Olympus.

But Prometheus cared for the mortals whom the gods had created and then abandoned to cold and darkness. He watched them huddle in caves, eating raw meat and shivering through the nights, and he decided to help them. The first gift came at the feast of Mecone, a gathering where mortals and immortals met to settle the rules of sacrifice. Prometheus prepared two offerings for Zeus. In one, he placed the finest cuts of beef, the rich red meat that mortals needed to survive, but he hid it inside the unappetizing stomach of the ox. In the other, he arranged the bones and scraps, wrapping them in glistening white fat so they looked like the better offering. Zeus, seeing through the trick but playing along, chose the bones wrapped in fat. From that day forward, mortals would burn the bones and fat as offerings to the gods while keeping the nourishing meat for themselves. Zeus was furious at being outwitted, and in his rage he hid fire from mortals, leaving them in darkness and cold. Prometheus, undeterred, climbed to the hearth of the gods on Olympus, took a spark of divine fire in a hollow fennel stalk, and carried it down to earth. He gave it to humanity, and with that single act, mortals learned to cook their food, warm their homes, forge metal, and build cities. Fire was the beginning of civilization itself.

Zeus's punishment was swift and terrible. He ordered Hephaestus, the god of the forge whose skill shaped the weapons of the gods, to bind Prometheus to a sheer rock face in the Caucasus Mountains, the range that lay beyond the known world where the barbarians lived. Hephaestus did so with heavy chains, though he did not relish the task, for Prometheus had been his friend. Then Zeus sent an eagle, a bird sacred to the king of the gods, to tear out Prometheus's liver every day. Because Prometheus was immortal, the liver grew back each night, and the torture began again with the dawn. The Greeks believed the liver was the seat of human emotions, and so the eagle devoured not just flesh but feeling itself. Prometheus hung on the rock for generations, exposed to the wind and sun, unable to move, unable to die, his screams echoing across the desolate peaks. He knew the future, for that was his gift, and he knew that one day he would be freed. But he also knew a secret that Zeus feared, a prophecy that gave him power even in chains.

In the play Prometheus Bound by the Athenian tragedian Aeschylus, who lived in the fifth century BCE, the chained Titan speaks to the chorus of Oceanids, the sea nymphs who have come to comfort him. He tells them that he knows the secret of Zeus's potential downfall. The Titaness Themis, his mother, who was also identified with Gaia, the earth itself, had told him that Zeus would one day be overthrown by his own child, just as Zeus had overthrown his father Cronus. The child would be born to a goddess who would marry a mortal, and the child would be greater than his father. Prometheus knew that this goddess was Thetis, the sea nymph whom Zeus desired. He refused to reveal the prophecy until Zeus agreed to release him, and so the stalemate continued. Meanwhile, the hero Heracles, the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene, who was forced to complete twelve impossible labors as penance for a fit of madness, came to the Caucasus during his travels. He found Prometheus on the rock and shot the eagle with his bow, killing it. Then he broke the chains that Hephaestus had forged, and Prometheus was free at last. Some say that Prometheus gave Heracles the secret of Thetis in exchange for his freedom, and that Heracles passed it on to Zeus, who then married Thetis to the mortal Peleus. Their son was Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Trojan War, greater than his father but not than Zeus himself, and the prophecy was fulfilled in a way that saved the king of the gods.

Prometheus was not merely a thief and a prisoner. In the Athenian tradition, he was the teacher of humanity, the one who gave mortals not just fire but the arts of civilization. He taught them numbers and writing, astronomy and medicine, the craft of building ships and the science of interpreting dreams. He was worshipped in Athens alongside Athena and Hephaestus, the gods of wisdom and craft, in a cult that celebrated human ingenuity. The festival of the Prometheia was held in his honor, where runners carried torches in relay races that symbolized the stolen fire. Athenians wore wreaths that represented his chains, a reminder that knowledge often comes at a cost. In later ages, Prometheus became a symbol for rebels and thinkers of every era. The Romantics of the nineteenth century saw him as the hero who defied tyranny for the sake of human progress. The scientist Mary Shelley subtitled her novel Frankenstein The Modern Prometheus, drawing a parallel between the Titan who created life from clay and the scientist who created life from dead flesh. In the twentieth century, the name was given to rockets and space probes, humanity's own theft of fire from the heavens. The rock in the Caucasus may be forgotten, but the flame he carried down to earth has never gone out.