Epimetheus

Epimetheus appears in Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days as a second generation Titan, son of Iapetus and brother to Prometheus, Atlas and Menoetius, his very name meaning afterthought or hindsight in deliberate contrast to Prometheus, whose name means forethought. The contrast is the whole point of the myth. When Zeus ordered that every living creature be given a set of natural gifts, speed, strength, fur, wings and the rest, Epimetheus took charge of the distribution and gave them all away before he reached humankind, leaving Prometheus to compensate by stealing fire from the gods on humanity's behalf, an act that brought down Zeus's lasting anger. Prometheus is said in the surviving accounts to have specifically warned his brother never to accept a gift from Zeus, advice Epimetheus promptly ignored when Zeus sent Pandora, the first woman, formed as a punishment for Prometheus's theft and carrying the jar that, once opened, released all the world's evils and left only hope trapped inside. Hesiod's text is explicit that Epimetheus's acceptance of Pandora, made without the reflection his brother's name implies and his own name denies, is what let those evils loose upon the world.

Unlike his brother Prometheus, who received real cult honors in classical Athens, most notably a torch race called the Promethia run from an altar he shared with Hephaestus in the grove of the Academy, Epimetheus is not attested as an object of worship anywhere in the ancient Greek world; no altar, festival or priesthood dedicated to him survives in either the literary or the archaeological record. Whatever standing he carries in the wider mythological tradition rests on his role in the sequence of creation itself, the Titan tasked with handing out qualities, speed, strength, fur, wings and the rest, to every newly made living thing before Prometheus stepped in on humanity's behalf, rather than on any devotional practice addressed to him directly. What the myth preserved instead of a cult was a moral figure: a byword in later Greek and Roman writers for thoughtless, unreflective action taken without weighing its consequences in advance, set permanently against his brother's name as a byword for foresight. The pairing was proverbial enough that ancient writers could invoke either name alone, forethought or afterthought, and expect an audience to understand the contrast being drawn without needing to retell the myth of Pandora at all.