Prometheus in Greek Mythology: The Titan Who Stole Fire

Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humanity. In Hesiod's Theogony, he first tricks Zeus over the division of a sacrificial ox, Zeus withholds fire in anger, and Prometheus smuggles it back to mortals hidden in a fennel stalk. His punishment was to be chained while an eagle ate his immortal liver, which grew back every night, until Heracles killed the bird. Zeus's answer to mortals was the first woman, named Pandora in Hesiod's Works and Days.

Prometheus quick facts

Who was Prometheus in Greek mythology?

Prometheus belongs to the generation of the Titans, the gods who ruled before the Olympians. In Hesiod's Theogony he is a son of the Titan Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene, and his brothers are Atlas, Menoetius and Epimetheus. Each brother comes to grief: Zeus strikes Menoetius with a thunderbolt and sends him down to Erebus, Atlas is made to hold up the sky at the edge of the world, Epimetheus brings ruin on mortals by accepting the woman Zeus made, and Prometheus is chained.

His name was read as "forethought," and his brother Epimetheus as "afterthought." The pair work as opposites: Prometheus plans ahead, Epimetheus understands only when it is too late.

Prometheus did not fight against Zeus. In Prometheus Bound he says he took Zeus's side in the war against the Titans, on his mother's advice, and that his counsel helped send Cronus and his allies down into Tartarus. In that version, his later punishment is a falling-out between allies.

Why did Prometheus steal fire?

Hesiod tells it as a contest of wits in two rounds.

Round one: the trick at Mecone. When gods and mortals were settling their differences at Mecone, Prometheus butchered an ox and made two portions. One held the meat and rich innards, hidden inside the animal's stomach. The other held the bare bones, wrapped in glistening fat. Zeus chose the fat. Hesiod insists that Zeus saw through the trick and chose anyway, already planning trouble for mortals, but the result stands: ever since, humans burn the white bones for the gods on their altars and keep the meat for themselves. The myth explains why the gods' share of a Greek sacrifice was the part people could not eat.

Round two: the theft. Angry at being outwitted, Zeus withheld the power of fire from mortals. Prometheus stole it and carried it to them inside a hollow stalk of fennel, a plant whose dry pith can hold a smoldering ember. In Works and Days, Hesiod says Zeus had hidden the livelihood of mortals because of the deception, and that Prometheus stole fire back for men in a hollow fennel stalk.

How was Prometheus punished?

According to Hesiod, Zeus bound Prometheus with unbreakable chains and a shaft or pillar driven through the middle, and sent a long-winged eagle against him. The bird ate his liver, which was immortal, and whatever it ate by day grew back at night. The punishment could go on forever.

The sources do not agree on where this happened. Hesiod names no place. Prometheus Bound opens with Hephaestus, against his own will, riveting Prometheus to a rocky crag in Scythia at the far edge of the world, under the eye of Power and Violence. In that play the eagle has not yet arrived: Hermes threatens it at the end, as a further punishment to come. Apollodorus' Library has Hephaestus nail him to Mount Caucasus.

How is Pandora connected to Prometheus?

Pandora is Zeus's answer to the stolen fire. In the Theogony, Zeus makes an evil for men as the price of fire. Hephaestus forms a maiden out of earth and Athena dresses her. The Theogony never names her and says that from her comes the race of women.

Works and Days tells the fuller story and gives the name. Hephaestus mixes earth and water, Athena teaches her weaving, Aphrodite gives her grace, and Hermes gives her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature. She is called Pandora because all the Olympians gave her a gift. Prometheus had warned his brother never to accept a gift from Zeus, but Epimetheus took her in, and only understood his mistake afterwards.

Pandora then lifts the lid of a great jar, a pithos in Hesiod's Greek, and lets sorrows and diseases loose among mortals. Only Hope stays inside, under the rim. The famous "Pandora's box" is not ancient. The box is generally traced to the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who retold the story with a small box in place of Hesiod's storage jar.

Who freed Prometheus?

Heracles. In the Theogony, Heracles kills the eagle and frees Prometheus from his torment, and Hesiod is careful to say that Zeus allowed it so that his son's fame would be greater than before.

Prometheus Bound turns the release into a prophecy. Prometheus tells Io, the wandering girl Zeus has pursued, that a descendant of hers in the thirteenth generation will set him free; the description fits Heracles. He also holds a secret that gives him leverage: he knows of a marriage that would produce a son stronger than Zeus, and he refuses to name the bride. Later writers identify her as the sea nymph Thetis, who was married off to a mortal instead and became the mother of Achilles. The sequel plays that told how the conflict ended survive only in fragments.

Apollodorus brings the strands together. Heracles shoots the eagle on the Caucasus and frees Prometheus. He also offers Zeus the centaur Chiron, whom Heracles had accidentally wounded with a poisoned arrow, as an immortal willing to die in Prometheus' place.

Did Prometheus create humans?

Not in Hesiod. In the Theogony and Works and Days, mortals already exist when Prometheus helps them. The idea that he shaped the first people from earth and water appears in later sources. Apollodorus' Library says he molded humans from water and earth. Ovid's Metamorphoses offers it as one of two possible origins: either a divine creator made humans, or the son of Iapetus shaped them from earth mixed with rainwater, in the image of the gods.

Plato's Protagoras tells yet another version. There, the gods form mortal creatures inside the earth and give Prometheus and Epimetheus the job of handing out their abilities. Epimetheus asks to do it alone and spends every gift on the animals, leaving humans naked, unshod and unarmed. Prometheus fixes the mistake by stealing fire and technical skill from the workshop of Athena and Hephaestus.

How do Hesiod, Aeschylus and Plato tell the story differently?

The three main versions give Prometheus very different characters.

In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus claims that before him humans saw without seeing and lived like ants in sunless caves. He also stopped them from foreseeing their own deaths by giving them blind hopes. Plato's Protagoras draws a different lesson: Prometheus could not reach the political wisdom kept in Zeus's citadel, so humans who had fire and tools still could not live together until Zeus gave everyone a share of justice.

In the sources

Prometheus' main ancient sources are Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, the tragedy Prometheus Bound, Plato's Protagoras, Apollodorus' Library and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Prometheus Bound has come down under the name of Aeschylus, but many modern scholars doubt he wrote it.

The sources disagree on several key points:

• Who was his mother? Clymene, daughter of Oceanus, in Hesiod; Themis, whom the play identifies with Gaia, in Prometheus Bound; Asia, another daughter of Oceanus, in Apollodorus.
• Why did he steal fire? In Hesiod, to undo a punishment provoked by his own trick at Mecone. Prometheus Bound frames it as love for mortals.
• Where was he chained? Hesiod gives no place, Prometheus Bound sets the scene in Scythia, and Apollodorus names the Caucasus.
• Was he released? Hesiod says Heracles freed him from his suffering, yet later in the same poem says that heavy chains still hold him. Apollodorus states plainly that Heracles freed him.
• Did he create humans? Not in Hesiod, where mortals already exist; yes in Apollodorus; in Ovid, it is one of two possible origins.

In popular culture

All of these are modern works, not ancient sources.

• Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Mary Shelley's subtitle casts Victor Frankenstein as a new Prometheus, a maker of life punished for overreaching. Prometheus as a maker of humans comes from later sources such as Ovid, not from Hesiod.
• Prometheus Unbound (1820). Percy Bysshe Shelley's verse drama takes its title from the lost sequel to Prometheus Bound, but in his preface Shelley says he rejected the reconciliation of hero and oppressor that he believed the lost play had staged.
• Prometheus (2012). Ridley Scott's film borrows the name for a starship searching for the beings who made humanity. The myth is a theme, not the plot.

Keep exploring

Prometheus is the Titan who crossed Zeus and paid for it. Meet his brother who holds up the sky in Atlas in Greek mythology, the whole older generation in the Titans of Greek mythology, and the god he defied in Who Was Zeus?. Trace the family of Iapetus on the Greek gods family tree, or test yourself with the Greek mythology quiz.