Prometheus at Mecone: Zeus Saw the Trick

The eagle comes first

Hesiod's Theogony is the oldest account of Prometheus, and it tells his story backward. The punishment comes before the crime. Zeus bound "ready-witted Prometheus" with "inextricable bonds, cruel chains," drove a shaft through his middle, and set a long-winged eagle on him to eat his immortal liver. In Hugh G. Evelyn-White's translation, "by night the liver grew as much again everyway as the long-winged bird devoured in the whole day."

Hesiod leaves out a lot of what people now picture. He names no mountain, and he gives no number of years. Wikipedia notes that some place the punishment at Mount Elbrus or Mount Kazbek in the Caucasus, but Hesiod names neither. The torment also isn't eternal in this text. The same passage ends with Heracles.

Four sons of Iapetus

The Titan Iapetus married Clymene, a daughter of Ocean, and she bore four sons. Hesiod gives each one an epithet and a fate. Stout-hearted Atlas holds up the wide heaven at the borders of the earth, in front of the Hesperides. Menoetius was "outrageous," so Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt and sent him to Erebus. Epimetheus was "scatter-brained," "a mischief to men who eat bread," because he was the first to accept the woman Zeus had made. Prometheus was "clever," "full of various wiles."

Other sources give him a different mother. Wikipedia notes that some accounts name Asia instead of Clymene, and that Prometheus Bound makes his mother Themis, who is identified with Gaia.

Freed for the glory of Heracles

Heracles, son of Alcmene, killed the eagle and freed the son of Iapetus. Hesiod makes clear that this was no defeat for Zeus. It happened "not without the will of Olympian Zeus who reigns on high" (Evelyn-White), so that the glory of his Theban-born son would grow even greater across the earth. Zeus stayed angry but gave up the wrath he had held.

The text may not all be Hesiod's here. When the poem sums up the episode, some eighty lines later, it mentions only that strong bands confined Prometheus and says nothing of a rescue. The classicist Angelo Casanova, along with some editors of the Theogony, treats the release passage as an interpolation added after Hesiod.

The ox at Mecone

The crime took place at Mecone, where "the gods and mortal men had a dispute." Hesiod never says what the dispute was about. He only says how Prometheus handled it. Prometheus cut up a great ox and made two portions. In one he put the meat and the rich inner parts on the hide and covered them with the ox's paunch, so the good food looked like offal. In the other he put the white bones, "dressed up with cunning art and covered with shining fat."

He set the portions before Zeus. Zeus rebuked him: "how unfairly you have divided the portions!" Prometheus answered "smiling softly" and told the greatest of the gods to take whichever portion his heart preferred.

Zeus was not fooled

This is where the summary and the text split. Wikipedia's summary says Zeus "chose" the fat-wrapped bones, which reads as if he was tricked. Hesiod says he wasn't. In Evelyn-White's rendering, Zeus "saw and failed not to perceive the trick, and in his heart he thought mischief against mortal men."

He lifted the white fat with both hands anyway, saw the bones, and got angry. Hesiod gives this as the reason mortals burn white bones to the gods on their altars.

So the contradiction is inside the poem. A god who can't be deceived picks the deception with his eyes open and is still furious about it. Hesiod needs both things to be true: Zeus has to know everything, and the sacrifice custom has to have an origin. The way out is that Zeus's anger was already pointed at mortals before he chose.

Fire in a fennel stalk

Zeus kept the trick in mind from then on, and he "would not give the power of unwearying fire" to mortal men. Prometheus then played a second trick and "stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk" (Evelyn-White). When Zeus saw firelight among men, he was "stung in spirit."

Wikipedia's summary describes the fire as something humans already had and Zeus took away. The Theogony line only says he would not give it. Works and Days goes further. According to Wikipedia's account of that poem, Zeus hid "the means of life" as well. If Prometheus had not provoked him, a man could have worked one day and had enough for a whole year.

The maiden without a name

The price of fire was a woman. The Limping God, Hephaestus, shaped the likeness of a shy maiden out of earth. Athena dressed her in silver clothing, put an embroidered veil and fresh garlands on her head, and Hephaestus made her a gold crown worked with creatures that looked alive. Hesiod calls her "the beautiful evil to be the price for the blessing" (Evelyn-White).

The Theogony never names her. The name Pandora, "all gifts," first appears in Works and Days. There Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes, the Graces and the Hours all help make her, and Epimetheus takes her even though Prometheus had warned him. She carries a jar, not the box of the popular phrase. Mischief, sorrow, plague and disease escape from it, and Hope stays sealed inside by the will of Zeus.

The Catalogue of Women complicates things further. One fragment calls Deucalion the son of Prometheus and Pronoea. Another names a Pandora, daughter of Deucalion, who bore Graecus to Zeus. So in the Hesiodic poems one Pandora is sent against Prometheus and another Pandora is his granddaughter.

What Aeschylus changed

Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus, turns the trickster into a benefactor. In the play Prometheus was decisive in the war against the Titans and fought for Zeus, which makes his punishment a betrayal of an ally. He says he taught humans writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine and science, and that he saved them when Zeus meant to destroy the race.

The play also leaves things out. There is no sacrifice at Mecone. Pandora shrinks to a single oblique line: Prometheus "caused blind hopes to live in the hearts of men." The play also gives him a secret. His mother Themis told him about a marriage that would produce a son who would overthrow Zeus. Hesiod already had this fear, but he attaches it to Metis, whom Zeus swallowed because her son was destined to become "king of gods and men." M. L. West suggested that Aeschylus's changes may come from a lost epic, the Titanomachy.

Later writers filled in the gaps. Hyginus, the Bibliotheca and Quintus of Smyrna identify the bride as Thetis, who was married off to the mortal Peleus and bore Achilles. The Bibliotheca adds that the centaur Chiron took on Prometheus's suffering and died in his place.

Clay, Athens, and the rebel

The best-known image of Prometheus shaping humans from clay isn't in Hesiod. Wikipedia traces it to Sappho, Aesop and Ovid. In Plato's Protagoras, Epimetheus gives all the natural gifts to the animals and leaves humans naked, so Prometheus steals fire from the workshop of Athena and Hephaestus. The Hesiodic Catalogue has a different origin: Zeus gave Deucalion stones, and "out of stones mortal men were made."

He had very little worship. Lucian noted that nobody could see a temple to Prometheus anywhere. Athens was the exception. There a torch relay ran from his altar in the Academy grove to the altar of Athena on the Acropolis. Argos and Opous both claimed to have his tomb. In Aristophanes' Birds he is a timid god who sneaks around in disguise so Zeus won't see him.

The Romantics went the other way. Goethe wrote Prometheus as openly defying Zeus. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820) never lets him submit. Mary Shelley subtitled Frankenstein "The Modern Prometheus."

What the text actually says

Hesiod calls him "kindly Prometheus" and still makes each of his tricks fall on mankind: the bones, the fire, the woman, the lost ease of life. The poem sums up the whole episode in one line: "it is not possible to deceive or go beyond the will of Zeus" (Evelyn-White). The rebel belongs to Aeschylus and the Romantics. Hesiod's Prometheus is a warning, and Zeus saw the trick before it was played.

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