Prometheus

• 1. Introduction

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  Prometheus is a Titan from Greek mythology whose name may mean "forethought" -- and whose story has never stopped being told. He defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and delivering it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge, and civilisation. For that act, the king of the gods condemned him to eternal torment: bound to a rock, his liver eaten daily by an eagle, only to regrow each night, ready to be devoured again. What kind of figure inspires that punishment and still wins the devotion of a city? What does it mean that the myth survived through ancient Greece, the Roman world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Romantic era, and into the twentieth century -- gathering new meaning at every turn? And why did Mary Shelley, Franz Kafka, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Goethe all reach for this same story when they needed to say something about the cost of human ambition?

• 2. Fire and Deception

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  The oldest surviving account of Prometheus appears in the late 8th-century BC poems of Hesiod, and the trouble begins at a meal. At a gathering called the trick at Mecone, Prometheus presented Zeus with two sacrificial offerings: a cut of beef hidden inside an unappetising ox stomach, and inedible bones wrapped in glistening fat. Zeus chose the bones. From that moment forward, the precedent was set: humans would keep the meat and burn fat and bones as offerings to the gods. Zeus, furious at having been tricked, withdrew fire from humanity entirely.

  Prometheus answered by concealing a live coal inside a fennel stalk and carrying it back to the human world. In Hesiod's Works and Days, the poet makes clear how much Zeus had planned to withhold. Without Prometheus's provocation, a single day's labour would have kept a household fed for a year; the rudder could have been hung up in smoke and the fields left to run wild. Prometheus's act made hard work the permanent condition of human life.

  In Works and Days, Zeus's counter-stroke was Pandora -- a figure fashioned from earth and water by Hephaestus, adorned with the help of Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes, the Graces, and the Hours. Prometheus warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept gifts from the gods. Epimetheus accepted anyway. Pandora's jar released mischief, sorrow, plague, and disease into the world. She closed the lid too late, and Hope alone remained trapped inside -- because Zeus forced her to seal it before Hope could escape.

• 3. Aeschylus Rewrites the Titan

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  Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to the 5th-century BC tragedian Aeschylus, transforms the myth considerably. Before the theft of fire, Prometheus had played a decisive role in the Titanomachy, the war between gods and Titans, securing victory for Zeus and the Olympians. Zeus's subsequent torture of Prometheus takes on the character of a particularly harsh betrayal.

  In Aeschylus's telling, Prometheus does not merely return fire to humanity. He claims to have taught humans writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and science. He asserts that Zeus had wanted to obliterate the human race entirely, and that he alone stopped him. Aeschylus also gives Prometheus a secret: his mother Themis, identified in the play with Gaia the Earth, told him of a potential marriage that would produce a son who could overthrow Zeus. It is apparently not until Prometheus reveals this secret that the two reconcile, in the lost final play of the trilogy, Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, known as Prometheus Pyrphoros.

  The critic Harold Bloom, writing in his research guide for Aeschylus, noted how generations of scholars argued over "the justice of Zeus" in these plays, sometimes reading them through a lens coloured by monotheistic theology. Thomas Rosenmeyer observed that in Aeschylus, as in Homer, supernatural and human causation operate simultaneously -- two ways of describing the same event. Karl-Martin Dietz put it simply: where Hesiod's Prometheus represents humanity's descent from communion with the gods into a troublesome present life, Aeschylus's version represents the ascent of humanity from primitive beginnings to civilisation. Of the four tragedies on Prometheus attributed to Aeschylus, only Prometheus Bound survives intact.

• 4. Athens and the Torch Races

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  Writing in the 2nd century AD, the satirist Lucian observed that while temples to the major Olympians stood everywhere, no temple to Prometheus was to be seen. The exception was Athens. There, at the altar of Prometheus in the grove of the Academy, several significant events on the Athenian calendar had their origin.

  For the Panathenaic festival, arguably the most important civic occasion in Athens, a torch race began at that altar, which stood outside the sacred boundary of the city. The relay passed through the Kerameikos, the district of potters and artisans who regarded Prometheus and Hephaestus as their patrons, and ended at the Acropolis, where the runners kindled the sacrificial fire on the altar of Athena. According to the geographer Pausanias, this torch relay -- called lampadedromia or lampadephoria -- was first instituted at Athens in honour of Prometheus. The wreaths worn by participants symbolised the chains of Prometheus himself.

  Athens also preserved a variant genealogy for the Titan. One tradition made Prometheus a son of Hera, fathered by the Giant Eurymedon; after Zeus married Hera, he threw Eurymedon into Tartarus and used the theft of fire as a pretext to punish Prometheus in the Caucasus. Kerényi suggested that Hephaestus may have been the "successor" of Prometheus in cult, though Hephaestus himself was of archaic origin. Both Argos and Opous claimed to be Prometheus's final resting place and erected tombs in his honour. The city of Panopeus maintained a cult statue honouring Prometheus for having created the human race there.

• 5. Romantic Defiance

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  For the Romantics, Prometheus was the rebel who resisted every form of institutional tyranny -- church, monarch, patriarch -- all of them embodied by Zeus. The Romantics drew comparisons between the Titan and the spirit of the French Revolution, the Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost, and the divinely inspired artist.

  Goethe wrote his poem "Prometheus" between 1772 and 1774, publishing it fifteen years later in 1789. The poem -- in which a character based on the mythic figure addresses God in a tone of accusation and defiance -- was one of the first encounters of the Prometheus myth with literary Romanticism. Kerényi noted a key change Goethe made: his Prometheus has Zeus for father and a goddess for mother, breaking from the traditional Titan lineage entirely. Goethe also wove in a deliberate echo of Luther's German translation of Saint Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians -- the phrase "Da ich ein Kind war" ("When I was a child") -- to frame Prometheus's defiance against a specifically biblical backdrop.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley published his four-act lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound in 1820, writing explicitly in response to Aeschylus and openly acknowledging the debt. In Shelley's version, Prometheus does not submit to Zeus (whom Shelley names Jupiter) but supplants him in a triumph of human intellect over tyrannical religion. Harold Bloom, in his 1959 book Shelley's Mythmaking, called Prometheus Unbound "the most capable imagining, outside of Blake and Wordsworth, that the Romantic quest for a Supreme Fiction has achieved." Lord Byron's poem on Prometheus also portrays the Titan as unrepentant.

  Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus in 1818, two years before her husband's play, writing it at the age of 18. The novel transferred the Promethean theme of creating human life into the hands of a scientist -- life granted through medical science rather than natural reproduction. It has been adapted into numerous films, from early versions with Boris Karloff to Kenneth Branagh's 1994 adaptation.

• 6. Kafka, Modernity, and Legacy

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  Franz Kafka wrote a short prose piece titled "Prometheus" in which he described four versions of the myth in sequence, each one more eroded than the last: first the original torment; then Prometheus pressing himself so deeply into the rock from pain that he became part of it; then his treachery forgotten over thousands of years by gods and eagles alike; finally, everyone growing weary and the wound closing on its own. Kafka ended with the observation: "There remains the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable."

  Reiner Stach noted that Kafka's world was mythical in nature, drawing on Old Testament and Jewish legend, and that his engagement with classical myth -- "Prometheus", "The Silence of the Sirens", "Poseidon" -- represented a reinterpretation of antiquity through his own imagination. The Nepali poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota, who died in 1949, wrote an epic titled Prometheus. Ted Hughes published a 1973 collection titled Prometheus on His Crag.

  The myth's reach extended into nomenclature and science. The artificial chemical element promethium is named after Prometheus. Saturn's moon Prometheus bears his name. The 2005 book American Prometheus, about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist associated with the development of the atomic bomb, chose the title to invoke the mythological tradition of dangerous knowledge given to humanity at enormous cost. In a 1988 interview on public television, Joseph Campbell compared Prometheus and Jesus as figures who each received punishment for a gift bestowed on humankind -- fire from Olympus in one case, propitiation from Heaven in the other -- and concluded that the influence of a vital person vitalises the world around them.