PROMETHEUS, son of the Titan Iapetus by the sea-nymph Clymene or by Themis (occasionally other parents are named).
He was the friend and benefactor of mankind. He defended men against Zeus, who, according to a widely diffused mythical theory, desired either to destroy the human race and supplant it by a new and better species, or to avenge himself because men had got the better of him. The pedigree and early exploits of Prometheus are given by Hesiod (Theog., 51 0-616). At a meet ing of gods and men at Mecone, it was the business of the assembly to decide what portions of slain animals the gods should receive in sacrifice.
On one side Prometheus arranged the best parts of the ox covered with offal, on the other the bones covered with fat, as the meat was covered in Homeric sacrifices. Zeus, invited to make his choice, chose the fat and found only bones beneath. A similar fable of an original choice, in which the chooser is be guiled by appearance, recurs in Africa and North America. See also Ada Thomsen in Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, XII. 460 et seq. Zeus, enraged at this trick, according to Hesiod, or, ac cording to other versions, desirous of exterminating the few people who had escaped the deluge of Deucalion, either never bestowed the gift of fire, or later withdrew it. Prometheus stole fire, concealed in a hollow fennel stalk (Hesiod, Works and Days) ; and a fennel stalk is still used in the Greek islands as a means of carrying a light (cf. Pliny, Nat. Hist., XIII. 126). Ac cording to some legends, he gained the fire by holding a rod close to the sun. Probably the hollow fennel stalk in which fire was carried got its place in myth from the fact of its common use. We thus find Prometheus in the position of the fire-bringer, or fire-stealer, and so connected with a very wide cycle of similar mythical benefactors, divine, human, or bestial, among all sorts of peoples from the Murri of Gippsland' to Europeans and Vedic Indians'.
In considering the whole question of fire mythology, one must beware of the hasty analogical method of reasoning too common among mythologists. For example, when a bird is spoken of as the fire-bringer, we need not necessarily conclude that, in each case, the bird means lightning. Again, because a hero is said to
have stolen or brought fire, we need not regard that hero as the personification of fire, and explain all his myth as a fire-myth. The legend of Prometheus has too often been treated in this fashion, though he is really a culture hero, of whose exploits, such as making men of clay, fire-stealing is no more than a single example. This tendency to evolve the whole myth of Prometheus from a belief that he is personified fire, or the fire-god, has been intensified by Kuhn's ingenious and plausible etymology of the name HpoianOths, which he would connect with Skr. pramantha, a fire-stick.
But there is no real reason to reject the classical interpretation, "fore-thinker" (cf. his brother Epimetheus, "after-thinker," "wise after the event"), for, as already shown, the myth of the stealing of fire and of the fire-stealer is current among races which are not Aryan, and never heard the word preimantha.
Prometheus and Hephaestus (q.v.) are frequently brought into contact, generally as opponents ; in some forms of the legend, Prometheus steals fire from Hephaestus's workshop, not from heaven. It is quite possible that Prometheus was an old and genuinely Greek deity, whose province included fire and its earlier industrial applications, but that he was later superseded by the popular oriental deity. If such were the case, it must have been very early, before either Homer or Hesiod wrote, 'See Brough Smith with Howitt, Native Tribes of South-east Australia, Aborigines of Victoria; Kuhn on bird fire-bringer in Isle of Man, Die Herabkunft des Facers p. tog ; Van Gennep, Mythes et legendes d'Australie.
probably not long after the first coming of the Achaeans to Greece. (A. L. ; H. J. R.) See I. 9' et seq.; L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, v. 378 et seq.