Prometheus and Pandora: Fire, the Jar and the First Woman

Prometheus was the Titan who tricked Zeus over the division of sacrifice and stole fire for humankind, and Pandora was the first woman, created by the gods as the punishment that came with it. Hesiod tells how Pandora opened a jar, not a box, releasing evils into the world while hope stayed inside, and how Prometheus was chained in the mountains while an eagle ate his liver, until Heracles set him free. Later Greek writers made Prometheus the maker of human beings and the giver of all the arts, and modern culture turned him into the archetypal rebel.

Prometheus, Son of Iapetus§

Prometheus was the son of the Titan Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene (or, in Aeschylus, of Themis), and the brother of Atlas, Menoetius and Epimetheus. His name was understood to mean "Forethought", and his brother's "Afterthought": Prometheus plans ahead, Epimetheus understands only when it is too late. The pairing frames the whole myth as a story about cunning intelligence (mētis) and its limits.

Unlike his brothers, Prometheus is not said to have fought against Zeus in the war of the Titans; in Prometheus Bound he claims to have been Zeus's ally. Nor was he only a figure of poetry. At Athens he had an altar in the grove of the Academy, where he was honoured together with Hephaestus as a power of fire and craft, and a torch race was run in his honour at the festival of the Prometheia. Potters and smiths had good reason to honour the god who had given them fire.

The Trick at Mekone and the Theft of Fire§

Hesiod's Theogony sets the story at Mekone, at the time when gods and mortal men were settling a dispute, that is, the moment when the two orders, which had once feasted together, were separated. Prometheus slaughtered a great ox and divided it into two portions. In one he placed the meat and rich entrails, hidden inside the unappetising ox-stomach; in the other he arranged the white bones and covered them with glistening fat. He invited Zeus to choose.

Zeus chose the fat-covered bones. Hesiod insists that the king of the gods saw through the trick and chose deliberately, already planning evil for mortals, though the story was probably once told with Zeus genuinely deceived. Either way, the episode explained the central rite of Greek religion, in which the thigh bones wrapped in fat were burned on the altar so that the smoke rose to the gods, while the worshippers shared the meat, as described in Greek religion and the mysteries.

In anger Zeus withheld fire from humankind. Prometheus stole it again, hiding the gleam of the "far-seen" fire in a hollow fennel stalk (narthex), whose dry pith smoulders slowly, and brought it to mortals. Fire here means more than warmth: it is cooking, sacrifice, metalworking and craft, the foundation of a distinctively human life between beasts and gods.

Pandora and the Jar of Evils§

Zeus answered with a gift that matched the trick: a beautiful thing hiding something bad. In the Theogony, Hephaestus moulds a maiden out of earth, Athena dresses and adorns her, and she is led before gods and men, "a beautiful evil" (kalon kakon), from whom descends the race of women. Hesiod's account is openly hostile, comparing women to drones who consume what the worker bees gather.

The Works and Days tells the fuller version. Hephaestus mixes earth with water and gives the figure a human voice and the face of a goddess; Athena teaches her weaving; Aphrodite pours grace upon her head; and Hermes gives her a "shameless mind and a deceitful nature". The Seasons and Graces adorn her with flowers and golden necklaces. In Hugh Evelyn-White's translation of 1914, Hermes "called this woman Pandora, because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread." Hermes brought her to Epimetheus, who forgot his brother's warning never to accept a gift from Zeus and understood the harm only when it was done.

Until then, Hesiod says, mortals had lived free from toil and disease. Pandora lifted the great lid from a jar (pithos) and scattered its contents, bringing countless miseries among people; diseases now roam silently by day and night. Only Hope (Elpis) remained inside, under the rim of the jar, because Pandora replaced the lid by the will of Zeus. Whether hope trapped in the jar is a comfort kept for humankind or one more evil withheld has been debated since antiquity.

The familiar "box" is a late error. When Erasmus of Rotterdam retold the story in his Adagia in the early sixteenth century, he wrote pyxis, a small box, instead of pithos, and the phrase "Pandora's box" passed into European languages. Dora and Erwin Panofsky traced this history in Pandora's Box (1956), together with Christian comparisons between Pandora and Eve. The name itself may once have been a title of the Earth as "giver of all"; a white-ground cup in the British Museum, painted around 460 BCE, labels the newly made woman Anesidora, "she who sends up gifts", another epithet of the earth goddess.

The Punishment of Prometheus§

Zeus bound Prometheus with unbreakable chains driven through the middle of a pillar and sent a long-winged eagle to eat his immortal liver, which grew back each night as much as the bird had devoured by day. Hesiod says that Heracles, with Zeus's consent, killed the eagle and freed the Titan from his suffering, so that the glory of Zeus's own son might be greater. A Laconian cup of about 550 BCE, now in the Vatican Museums, shows the eagle at Prometheus's breast beside his brother Atlas holding up the sky.

The best-known treatment is the tragedy Prometheus Bound, transmitted under the name of Aeschylus, though many scholars now doubt that he wrote it and its date is uncertain. Kratos (Power) and Bia (Force) oversee Hephaestus as he reluctantly pins Prometheus to a crag at the edge of the world in Scythia. Prometheus, defiant, recounts how he gave mortals not only fire but numbers, writing, the taming of animals, ships, medicine, divination and mining, so that, as he puts it, every human art comes from Prometheus. He also boasts of a secret that could topple Zeus. The play's sequels, Prometheus Unbound and probably Prometheus the Fire-Bearer, survive only in fragments.

Later mythographers explain the secret and the settlement. The sea nymph Thetis was fated to bear a son greater than his father; Zeus, who desired her, married her instead to the mortal Peleus, and their son was Achilles. Apollodorus places Prometheus's punishment on the Caucasus and has the centaur Chiron, wounded incurably by Heracles, give up his immortality in Prometheus's place.

Prometheus the Maker of Humankind§

Hesiod does not say that Prometheus created human beings, but later writers did. Apollodorus and Ovid describe him shaping people from earth and water, and Pausanias was shown lumps of clay-coloured stone at Panopeus in Phocis that, he was told, still smelled of human skin, left over from Prometheus's modelling.

Plato's Protagoras (early fourth century BCE) gives the story a philosophical turn. When the gods made mortal creatures, Epimetheus was given the task of distributing their qualities: claws, speed, fur, wings. He used them all up on the animals, leaving human beings naked and defenceless. Prometheus therefore stole technical skill and fire from Athena and Hephaestus, but people still lacked the art of living together in cities, until Zeus sent Hermes to give all of them a share of respect (aidōs) and justice (dikē).

Prometheus was also the father of Deucalion, who married Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. Warned by his father, Deucalion built a chest and survived the flood that Zeus sent to destroy the bronze race; afterwards, following an oracle of Themis, the couple threw stones over their shoulders, which became new men and women.

Prometheus and Pandora in Later Thought§

Prometheus has been reinterpreted more than almost any other figure of Greek myth. For Hesiod he is a clever trickster whose cleverness brings ruin; for Prometheus Bound he is a benefactor suffering under a new tyrant; for Plato he is the source of human technology, which needs justice to complete it. Christian writers sometimes compared the moulding of Pandora with the creation of Eve and the jar with the fall, a parallel that made Pandora an emblem of curiosity and temptation in Renaissance art.

The Romantic age made Prometheus a hero of defiance. Goethe's poem Prometheus (written around 1774) has him scorn the gods while shaping human beings in his own image; Byron's Prometheus (1816) praises his endurance; Percy Bysshe Shelley's lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) imagines his liberation as the overthrow of tyranny; and Mary Shelley subtitled Frankenstein (1818) "The Modern Prometheus". This rebel Prometheus belongs alongside the heroic Satan of the same period, discussed in Romantic Satanism. In the twentieth century the classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant returned to Hesiod's version, reading the sacrifice, the fire and Pandora as one connected account of the human condition: mortals must cook their food, labour to grow grain, and marry to continue their line, because they live apart from the gods.

Frequently asked questions§

Was it Pandora's box or Pandora's jar?§

In Hesiod it was a large jar, a pithos, of the kind used to store grain, oil or wine. The "box" comes from Erasmus's sixteenth-century retelling, which used the Greek word pyxis, and the error stuck.

What was left in Pandora's jar?§

Hope (Elpis) remained inside, under the rim, because Pandora closed the lid before it could escape. Ancient and modern readers disagree about whether this means hope was preserved for humankind or withheld from it.

Why did Prometheus steal fire?§

In Hesiod, Zeus hid fire from mortals in anger at Prometheus's trick over the sacrificial meat, and Prometheus stole it back out of sympathy for humankind. In Plato's version he steals fire and skill because his brother had left human beings without any means of survival.

Who freed Prometheus?§

Heracles killed the eagle and released him, with Zeus's consent according to Hesiod. Later sources add that Zeus agreed after Prometheus revealed the prophecy about Thetis, and that the centaur Chiron gave up his immortality as part of the settlement.

Sources and further reading§

• Theogony — Hesiod, c. 700 BCE
• Works and Days — Hesiod, c. 700 BCE
• Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica — Hugh G. Evelyn-White (trans.), 1914
• Prometheus Bound — Aeschylus, 5th century BCE
• Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol — Dora and Erwin Panofsky, 1956
• Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence — Karl Kerényi, 1963
• Myth and Thought among the Greeks — Jean-Pierre Vernant, 1983
• Prometheus — Carol Dougherty, 2006