The Titan Who Stole Fire, Benefactor of Mankind
Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetus, bears a name meaning 'forethought.' At Mecone he divided a sacrificial ox into two portions — the good meat hidden inside the stomach, bare bones dressed in gleaming fat — and let Zeus choose; the god took the bones, which is why mortals thereafter burned bones and fat on the altar and kept the meat for themselves. When Zeus withheld fire in anger, Prometheus stole it back inside a hollow fennel stalk and carried it down to mankind.
For this Zeus had him bound to a crag in the Caucasus, where an eagle fed daily on his liver, which grew whole again each night, until Heracles shot the bird and released him. Zeus also had Hephaestus mold from clay the first woman, Pandora, and sent her to Prometheus's brother Epimetheus; she lifted the lid of her jar and loosed sickness and sorrow upon the world, leaving only hope inside. Aeschylus's tragedy Prometheus Bound fixed his image as the seer who suffers rather than submit to power, an image Shelley renewed in Prometheus Unbound (1820).
