Prometheus: One Theft, Two Thieves

Two lamps burn in this gallery, and they throw two different shadows of the same figure. Under the first, set there by Hesiod around 700 BCE, a clever Titan stands beside a butchered ox, smiling at a joke that will cost humankind dearly. Under the second, lit by the tragedy we know as Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the same Titan hangs in chains on a cliff at the end of the world, and the audience is asked to pity him. Both versions share the essentials: a trick, a theft, a hollow stalk of fennel carrying fire, a punishment that eats at him daily. They disagree about almost everything those objects mean.

The ox divided at Mecone

Hesiod sets the scene in the Theogony, at Mecone, “when gods and mortal men were settling their differences”. The verb can also mean “were being sorted apart”: this is where gods and humans take their separate places. Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetus, takes charge of a great ox and divides it. In one heap he puts the meat and the rich, fatty entrails, then hides them inside the ox’s stomach, the least appetising wrapping imaginable. In the other he arranges the white bones “with cunning craft” and drapes them in glistening fat. He offers Zeus the choice.

Zeus complains that the portions are unequal. Prometheus, smiling softly, tells him to take whichever his heart prefers. Here Hesiod makes a curious move. He insists that Zeus “knew, and was not blind to the trick”, and that he lifted the fat with both hands while already planning grief for mortals. The poet cannot allow his king of the gods to be fooled, so the deception becomes something Zeus permits in order to justify what follows. Then Zeus sees the bare bones beneath the fat, and anger reaches his heart.

The episode explains a puzzle every Greek worshipper could see at the altar. In ordinary animal sacrifice the thigh bones wrapped in fat were burned for the gods, whose share rose as fragrant smoke, while the people ate the meat. Why should the immortals get the inedible part? Because a Titan once rigged the division, and the arrangement stuck.

And from that day the tribes of men upon the earth burn white bones to the deathless gods on altars thick with smoke.

Hesiod, Theogony (our rendering)

Fire carried in a fennel stalk

Zeus answers trick with trick. In the Theogony he withholds “the strength of tireless fire” from mortals. In Works and Days, Hesiod’s poem about farming and hard work, the same moment is told as Zeus hiding the means of life, so that people must labour for what was once easy. Either way, Prometheus steals the fire back and carries it out in a hollow stalk of fennel, the narthex. It is a practical detail. Giant fennel grows tall across the Mediterranean, and its dry stalk holds a soft pith that smoulders slowly without bursting into flame: a natural lantern for a stolen ember.

Zeus’s next move is the darkest part of Hesiod’s account. “In return for fire” he has Hephaestus mould a maiden from earth, Athena dresses her, and she is presented to the world as “a beautiful evil”. In Works and Days she is named Pandora, accepted by Prometheus’s slow-witted brother Epimetheus despite warnings, and she lifts the lid of a jar from which troubles scatter; only Hope stays inside, caught under the rim. Hesiod’s misogyny is plain and should be named as such. For him, woman is the price of fire, part of the same bargain that gave the gods the bones.

Prometheus himself is bound with unbreakable chains driven through the middle of a pillar, and an eagle comes daily to eat his immortal liver, which grows back each night. Hesiod adds that Heracles later shot the bird, and that Zeus allowed it so that his son’s kleos, his glory, would grow greater on the earth. The lesson is stated without decoration: no one can deceive or slip past the mind of Zeus.

The prisoner on the Scythian rock

Walk to the second lamp. Prometheus Bound opens at the end of the earth, in a trackless Scythian waste, where the personified powers Might and Violence watch the smith-god Hephaestus hammer a kinsman to the rock. Hephaestus hates the job. Might tells him to get on with it, so that the prisoner may learn to give up his “man-loving way”. That phrase sets the tone of the whole play.

There is no Mecone here, no ox, no Pandora. The fennel stalk survives: Prometheus says he hunted out the source of fire and hid it in a hollow stem, and it became a teacher of every craft. But the theft is now one gift among many. When Zeus meant to wipe out the human race and breed a new one, Prometheus alone stood against him. He took away people’s foresight of their own death and planted “blind hopes” instead. Then, in a long speech to the chorus of sea-nymphs, he lists everything else. Before him, humans saw without seeing and lived like ants in sunless caves. He taught them when the stars rise and set, the art of number, the joining of letters, the yoking of beasts, ships with linen wings, medicine, the reading of omens and the mining of metals. Every human art, he concludes, comes from Prometheus.

This Prometheus is no trickster. He is the son of Themis, the goddess of right order whom the play identifies with Earth, and he knows the future. He fought for Zeus against the other Titans and was repaid with chains. He holds a secret, a marriage that would give Zeus a son stronger than his father, and refuses to give it up. The play ends with the cliff split by thunder and Hermes promising that an eagle will come, an uninvited guest, to feast on him daily. Zeus never appears. We see him only through the suffering of others, and he looks like a young tyrant.

Two thieves, one fire

Set side by side, the two portraits explain each other. Hesiod’s Prometheus is clever but small. Every scheme rebounds, and each move ends with humankind worse off: saddled with a sacrifice that favours the gods, with toil, with Pandora’s jar. The subject is the order of the world under Zeus and the folly of testing it. The tragedian’s Prometheus is a benefactor who sees further than his jailer, and the fire he brings is civilisation itself. Hesiod’s thief loses the argument; the tragedian’s thief loses only his freedom.

Plato’s Protagoras offers a third reading. There, Epimetheus hands out claws, fur and speed to the animals and runs out of gifts before he reaches humans, who stand naked and unarmed. Prometheus steals fire together with the craft wisdom of Hephaestus and Athena so that people can survive. What he cannot reach is the art of living together, kept in Zeus’s own citadel, which Zeus later sends down through Hermes as justice and a sense of shame. Technology arrives first; politics has to wait.

The modern world inherited the tragedian’s version. The Romantics made Prometheus a rebel against tyranny, and Mary Shelley subtitled Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus”. Yet Hesiod’s darker question has never quite gone away: what does it cost to take what the gods withheld? Greek myth keeps returning to moments when a portion of food settles a fate, from the ox at Mecone to the pomegranate seed in the Underworld, and to inventive humans who outfly their own judgement, as Daedalus and his son discover over the Aegean. For the god Prometheus tried to cheat, find Zeus in our Pantheon.