Prometheus

Prometheus is the Titan whose name means "forethought," and in Greek myth he is the great benefactor and champion of humankind against the gods. When Zeus withheld fire from mortals, Prometheus stole it, carrying it down, in Hesiod's account, hidden in a fennel stalk, and gave it to humanity, and with it the arts of civilization: for later writers, everything from metalwork and medicine to writing and number.

In Hesiod he also tricks Zeus at Mecone over the division of the sacrificial ox, arranging that the gods receive the bones wrapped in fat while humans keep the meat, a myth that explains why sacrifice takes the form it does. For these thefts and deceptions on humanity's behalf Zeus exacts a terrible punishment: Prometheus is chained to a rock in the Caucasus, and each day an eagle devours his liver, which grows back each night, so that the torment is endless, until, generations later, Heracles shoots the eagle and frees him. Aeschylus, in Prometheus Bound, made him the archetype of noble defiance against tyranny, suffering for a gift to others; and the Romantics, Shelley, Byron, Mary Shelley's "modern Prometheus", took him up as the very symbol of rebellion, creativity, and the costs of stealing power from the gods.

The earliest surviving portraits of Prometheus, in Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, present him mainly as a trickster who angers Zeus by cheating him over a sacrificial division and by stealing fire, and who is punished for it, with little interest in fire as a gift to humanity for its own sake. The heroic reading familiar today, Prometheus as humanity's deliberate benefactor and a rebel who defies an unjust tyrant to give people knowledge and technology, comes into focus centuries later in Prometheus Bound, traditionally credited to Aeschylus.

Modern stylistic and metrical analysis has raised real doubts about that attribution, and a number of scholars now consider the play the work of a later, unknown playwright working in the Aeschylean manner rather than Aeschylus himself. Whoever wrote it, that version, not Hesiod's, is the one that shaped later reception: it is the source of Prometheus as a heroic rebel against arbitrary divine power, an image Romantic writers seized on directly, and which Mary Shelley invoked by subtitling Frankenstein "The Modern Prometheus." The figure most people know is therefore largely a later reinterpretation layered onto an older and considerably less flattering story about a clever god who was punished for outwitting a more powerful one.