Prometheus The Benefactor Of Mankind

Prometheus was one of the Titans and the benefactor of mankind, whose most important gift to mortals was that of fire. His myth first occurs in Hesiod, where he is the son of the Titan Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene, and the brother of Epimetheus, Atlas and Menoetius.When gods and men were about to share a meal at Mecone, it was given to Prometheus to serve them by dividing the meat of a great ox into two portions. He produced one portion consisting of the choice meat and entrails, but covered with the ox's stomach so that it looked unappealing, and another of the bones, but covered with rich and appetising fat. He told Zeus to choose which of the two portions would be the gods' share, and Zeus, completely taken in, chose the fat-covered bones. (This set a precedent for the division of the meats in all later sacrifices, where men always took the best part for themselves and burned the bones for the gods.) Zeus was angry at being tricked and punished mankind by withholding from them the gift of fire. But Prometheus stole fire from heaven and carried it secretly down to earth in a fennel stalk (the pith of which burns slowly, thus making a convenient means of carrying fire from one place to another). Then Zeus was once more full of wrath, and this time he punished men by having Hephestus fashion the first woman, Pandora,who was beautiful but deceitful, and would plague the lives of mankind by letting loose sorrows and sickness throughout the world. 

She was sent to Prometheus' gullible brother Epimetheus, and he, charmed by this vision of loveliness, took her as his bride.Zeus also punished Prometheus himself: he had him chained to a cliff in the Caucasian Mountains and sent an eagle, offspring of the monsters Typhonand Echidna, to prey on him. Every day the eagle tore out Prometheus' liver, which every night grew whole again so that his torment might continue. Long ages passed before this daily agony ended, when Zeus' son Heracles, on his way to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides, shot the eagle dead and released the Titan. Zeus allowed this to happen, pleased that this feat increased the fame and honour of his son, and at last relinquished his long anger. Prometheus rewarded Heracles by advising him that he would obtain the golden apples if he sent Atlas to fetch them, while he himself held up the sky. Heracles did as Prometheus suggested and accomplished his difficult Labour successfully.The chaining of Prometheus is dramatised in the tragedy Prometheus Bound, traditionally said to be by Aeschylus, which was the first play in a Prometheus trilogy. Here Zeus is depicted as a brutal tyrant, and Prometheus, son of Themis/Gaia, has done more for mankind than simply bring them fire: he has stopped Zeus from wiping out the human race when he wished to do so, and has taught men many useful skills, including architecture, agriculture,writing, medicine, the domestication of animals, the use of ships, mining for metals, and divination. Chained to his crag by Hephaestus,at the bidding of Cratos and Bia, he is comforted in his misery by a Chorus of Oceanids and by their father Oceanus.He is visited by 10, who has been transformed into a cow by Zeus, and he predicts her future and his own eventual release by her descendant, Heracles, Hermes arrives, demanding to be told a secret that the Titan knows, vital to Zeus' safety, but in vain, and Prometheus continues to cry defiance at Zeus, fearless of his thunderbolts

(1041-53):
Let the twisted fork of lightning fire be flung
against me: let the high air be stirred
with thunderclaps and the convulsive fury
of the winds: let earth to the roots of her foundations
shake before the blasting storm: let it confound
the waves of the sea and the paths of the heavenly stars
in a wild turmoil, and let him raise
my body high and dash it whirling down
to murky Tartarus. He cannot make me die.
At the end of the play Zeus hurls Prometheus down to Tartatus, rock and all.

We know something of the second play, Prometheus Freed, from fragments. Heracles killed the eagle, and Prometheus was reconciled with Zeus and set free in exchange for the secret told him by Themis: that the sea-goddess Thetis was destined to bear a son greater than his father. Zeus, who was at that time wooing Thetis, was thus saved from being overthrown by a mighty son, the very fate that he had inflicted on his own father, Cronus. Thetis was later married off to Peleus, and the fruit of their union was Achilles, a son indeed greater than his father.In later tradition Prometheus was sometimes said to have been not only the benefactor of the human race, but also its creator, fashioning it from clay. But mankind originated from him in another sense, for his son Deucalion married Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, and when Zeus sent the Great Flood over the earth, Deucalion and Pyrrha were the sole survivors. On Prometheus' advice they built an ark, stocked it with food, and lived safely on it until the rain ceased. As the only mortals left alive, it was then their task to repopulate an empty world. On Zeus' instructions,brought to them by Hermes, they picked up stones from the earth and threw them over their shoulders. Deucalion's stones were transformed into men, and Pyrrha's into women. Thus, in one way or another, the human race owes its existence to Prometheus.

The Titan also plays a part in other myths. He instead of Hephaestus was occasionally said to have been the 'midwife' who split Zeus' head with an axe so that he might give birth to Athena. He was also said to have released the Centaur Cheiron from endless suffering when he was wounded by one of Heracles' arrows. The immortal Centaur, in agony, longed in vain to die, so Prometheus offered himself to Zeus to be made immortal in Cheiron's place, and the Centaur gratefully died. This story implausibly ignores the fact that Prometheus, being a Titan, was already immortal. Prometheus attacked by the eagle, with Heracles rescuing him, occurs in ancient art as early as the seventh century BC, and it was he subject of one of the panels painted by Panaenus around Pheidias' great statue of Zeus at Olympus. Prometheus was worshipped in several places in the ancient world, including Athens where his cult was celebrated by a torch race, commemorating his gift of fire to man.

The Nature of the Greek Gods

Amongst the many creations of Greek culture, the Olympian gods have a particular interest. As with anything in the ancient world, we have various types of information about them. Some comes from archaeology, some from texts, some concerns history, some concerns thought. But whereas the great sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi was,and is, real, and we discover about the same sanctuary from our various sources of information, it is different with the individual gods. The ancient gods are not real – at least, that is the general supposition – and what our evidence leads us to is pictures that peoples created in their minds and shared in their imaginations. The gods are in fact the most powerful work of art created by the Greeks. And they live in different,but intersecting, dimensions, which combine to create the illusion of a single personality.

The primary dimension is that of cult (religious practice). Greeks prayed, sacrificed,poured libations, held festivals, demarcated places which would be precincts, built altars and temples, gave gifts and built ‘‘treasuries’’ to hold them all. In doing all this they represented themselves as performing acts to, for, or at least with an audience of, gods. It is far from unusual to have many gods (‘‘polytheism’’) or to think of them somehow as persons. But by the standards of other nations, Greek gods were exceptionally anthropomorphic – they were ‘‘shaped like people.’’ The focus of Greek worship tended not to be mighty stones or trees (‘‘aniconic,’’ non-representational, objects of worship), though they admired those too, but stone or wood shaped into statues of personal gods. Each god was an individual person and each was thought of as having their particular identity.Different Greek cities or ethne¯ (peoples who were not yet urbanized) worshiped broadly similar gods to each other. But the system was far from uniform and the Zeus

imagined in one place might be rather different from the Zeus imagined in another.Indeed, in a single place you might worship a variety of Zeuses, distinguished by their epithets – so Zeus ‘‘Meilichios,’’ Zeus the dangerous but hopefully ‘‘gentle,’’ is a different business from Zeus ‘‘Olympios,’’ the Zeus who is king of the gods on Mount Olympus. Each Olympian god is particularized by epithets, which are a bit of  compromise: they maintain a single identity (of Zeus), but diffract it into a rich spectrum of locations, functions, and traditions.

The second dimension is that of mythology. Myths might be local and might present for instance a supposed reason for a current religious practice, when they are described as ‘‘aetiological.’’ This would not be an actual, historical reason, because myths are no more true than gods are real. They are a way of thinking about the world around us and the people in it. It is in the nature of the worship of the Greek gods to generate myths,and it is in the nature of poets, the entertainers of Greek culture, to collect them and
synthesize them into a compromise set of stories that develop shared ideas of what the gods are like and how they behave. The principal Greek myths are widely known in ancient Greece and find their place in epics, lyric poetry, drama, and all manner of cultural production. They are everywhere in Greek art too.
The third dimension is that of thought about gods and the divine, ‘‘theology.’’ But Greece did not have official theologians: what it had was poets, philosophers, and anyone else who was prepared to think. Here finally we may worry about how the universe is run and speculate on the justice or the goodness of the gods. It is at this point that personal gods have their weakest grip and abstraction sets in most easily.So, to take the major cult site of Zeus in the Peloponnese, the huge temple of Zeus at Olympia (built for cult, decorated with  myth) provokes reflection on his power (theology). The ceremonies and celebrations enact that power with grandeur and significance, and in so doing focus something of Greek identity onto this site. This happens explicitly once every four years and implicitly, through memory and monuments, at all times in between, as this is always the place that carries the history of the ritual and its apparently limitless future. The huge altar of ashes grows with this year’s offerings; and the animals sacrificed in large number to the god, awesomely struck down and wailed over, give their lifeblood not to us but (back) to the god. This is the ‘‘same’’ Zeus whom Homer celebrates in the Iliad, mighty, remote, never actually walking the earth, distributing human happiness and misery, deciding the end of everything, including us. But he also behaves in ways that are harder to understand: he is said to have flung the god Hephaestus from heaven to land on Lemnos where the worship of the god of fire can take place; he argues with his wife (for why else should their marriage need to be renewed annually?); he is seduced by her on Mount Ida, in a scene presented rather daringly or wickedly by the poet. 

At Olympia we will also look forward to the traditional ritual song celebrating his thunderbolt, and we will think, as we look to the sky in prayer, about that great being whose justice is so hard to grasp, as Aeschylus showed us in his last plays – the Agamemnon and the Prometheus Bound (if it is by him). And as we look at the temple’s sculptures, we see a mythology surrounding Zeus – a pediment showing the chariot race of Pelops for the hand of Hippodameia, a pediment displaying Zeus’s son Apollo bringing order to Centaurs and Lapiths, and the metopes displaying the work of another of his sons,Heracles, founder of the Olympic Games, namely his twelve labors to civilize the world and overcome the adversity that Zeus’s wife Hera had put in his path. Zeus himself once again is mysteriously absent from these scenes, but we may reflect upon
his world order and then enter the temple to see what came to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the huge enthroned Zeus by Pheidias, a statue which changed the path of Greek art.Greek gods may not be neatly packaged, but that helps them to provoke thought as we bring together ideas from all the different places where we encounter them –participating in cult, watching cult, seeing the myth depicted, hearing it acted out,listening to it sung. You could only emerge humbled from the experience of Zeus.

The Revolt of the Giants

                     Led by Athena, the Olympians mount a charge against the Giants

THE REVOLT OF THE GIANTS  The Giants were born to Sky (Uranus) and Mother Earth (Gaea) at a place called Thracian Phlegra ('place of burning') and they numbered twenty-four. Mother Earth was angry because Zeus had confined her children, the Titans, to the deepest pits of Tartarus, after defeating them following a ten-year war. Furious, she directed the Giants to gain revenge by attacking Mount Olympus, with orders to overthrow Zeus and his fellow Olympians. "But Earth, vexed on account of the Titans, brought forth the giants, whom she had by Sky. These were matchless in the bulk of their bodies and invincible in their might; terrible of aspect did they appear, with long locks drooping from their head and chin, and with the scales of dragons for feet." Apollodorus, Library and Epitome (ed. Sir James George Frazer) So what did these terrible creatures look like? Harry Thurston Peck, in Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898), had this to say about their appearance: "In the oldest works of art the Giants are represented in human form and equipped with armor and spears; but in course of time their attributes became terrific -- awful faces, long hanging hair and beard, the skins of wild animals for garments, trunks of trees and clubs for weapons. "In the latest representations, but not before, their bodies end in two scaly snakes instead of feet...In the Gigantomachia of Pergamus (see image below), the grandest representation of the subject in antiquity, we find a great variety of forms; some quite human, others with snakes' feet and powerful wings, others with still bolder combinations of shape; some are naked, some clothed with skins, some fully armed, and others slinging stones." The Giants gathered together and, without warning, began to hurl huge rocks, oak tree trunks and fire-brands upwards from their mountaintops, laying siege to mighty Mount Olympus and startling the unsuspecting Olympians. The 24 Giants threatened to overwhelm the gods with their ferocious attack, piling huge rocks one atop another in an effort to construct a stairway to Heaven. To make matters worse, Hera, wife to Zeus, prophesized that the Giants could never be killed by any Olympian god -- only a single, lion-skinned mortal could perform this Herculean task, she said. But even that would be futile if the Giants got their hands on a sacred herb that grew on earth. This wonderful plant, created by Mother Earth for her children to use, rendered invulnerable anyone who consumed it, and it was up to the Olympian gods to find it before the Giants did. Zeus held a war council with Athena, war-like goddess of wisdom, and the two crafted a plan of action. Athena went off to find Heracles (Hercules), the lion-skinned mortal whom Hera had referred to. Meanwhile, Zeus ordered Helios (the sun god), Selene (the moon goddess) and Eros (god of love) not to shine until his task was complete, using the cover of darkness to evade the army of Giants and safely descend to earth. Zeus then groped around the earth, guided by the feeble light of the stars, until he found the magical herb. It was exactly where Athena had said it would be, and Zeus hurried with it back to Olympus, thrilled to have located it before his enemy did. It was none too soon, for the embattled Olympians were under terrific attack from the Giants, who grew bolder and stronger by the moment, having risen perilously close to Olympus.                                                   Giants laying siege to Mount Olympus, home of the gods Athena had returned with Heracles, the only mortal who could save the gods, according to Hera's prophecy. As usual, he was clad in the skin of the Nemean Lion and carried his famous huge club and dreaded bows and arrows. His arrows had been dipped in the putrid blood of the dying Lernean Hydra, which made them deadly poisonous. The great hero at once let fly an arrow at the charging leader of the Giants, a brute named Alcyoneus (his name literally translates as 'Mighty Ass'). The aim was true -- Heracles was the mightiest mortal warrior of all time -- and the arrow found its mark, dropping Alcyoneus to the ground. But instantly the Giant sprang back up to his feet, uninjured in spite of the poisoned arrow, much to the dismay of the Olympians. The land of Phlegra was the creature's native home and falling to its soil at once revived him. As long as Alcyoneus remained on Phlegra, he was unbeatable. Things looked real bad for the gods! Quick-thinking Athena shouted to Heracles to drag the brute to another country. Swiftly Heracles immobilized Alcyoneus, tossed him over his broad shoulders, and rushed him over the Thracian border. The Giant's breath was so revolting that an ordinary mortal would have been overcome at once, but Heracles used the magical herb that Zeus had brought to plug his nostrils, rendering the ogre's halitosis moot. Once away from Phlegran soil, Heracles had no trouble crushing the creature's skull with a mighty blow from his huge club, and the leader of the Giants lay dead. One down, 23 to go... From the mighty pyramid of rocks constructed by the Giants leaped Porphyrion, second in command and even more hideous than his dead brother. This monster was so frightful, the terrified Olympians scattered in fear, looking for places to hide. Only brave Athena stood her ground, ready to defend her palatial home.   Porphyrion wanted nothing to do with Athena (he was smarter than he looked), rushing by her and lunging at Hera, Queen of the Olympians. The beast tried to strangle her, but a timely arrow from Eros turned his blood-lust to pure lust: Wounded in the liver by the love god's arrow, Porphyrion was gripped by uncontrollable desire. He ripped off Hera's exquisite robe, and that was enough to arouse Zeus' jealous wrath. Seeing his wife about to be molested, the king of the Olympians roared at the Giant, knocking him to the ground with a thunderbolt. The creature sprang up immediately, but Heracles, returning to Phlegra just in time, was there to finish him off with an arrow. While this was happening, the Giant called Ephialtes ('Nightmare', 'He who leaps upon') had gotten the best of Ares, god of war. Ephialtes was the third leader of the Giants and definitely a ferocious force to be reckoned with. It looked as if Ares was doomed but Apollo shot an arrow that pierced the Giant in the left eye. Heracles quickly followed with another arrow, this one striking the creature in the right eye. That was the end of Ephialtes. Talk about a nightmare! The Olympian gods then took turns felling Giants, as Heracles stood nearby and promptly dispatched them one by one with his poisonous arrows. Here's a brief play-by-play of the action: Hecate burned Clytius with her torches, prepping him for Heracles. Dionysus wounded Eurytus with his thyrsus, providing an easy target for Heracles. Hephaestus scalded Mimas ('Mimicry') with a ladle of molten metal. An arrow from Heracles and he was toast. Athena crushed the skull of Pallas with a stone and stripped his skin when he tried to rape her. Heracles finished the job by dealing the death blow with his club. The Fates also took part in the rout, swinging brazen pestles very effectively. The dazed Giants hardly had time to figure out what had hit them, before Heracles finished them off. Only the peace-loving goddesses Hestia and Demeter refused to take part in this mighty battle, standing aside in dismay, horrified by the carnage all around. At stake was the fate of the universe, but they couldn't bring themselves to participate. The demoralized Giants, all their leaders now dead, fled back to earth, beating a hasty retreat, with the Olympians in hot pursuit. Enceladus, a fleet-footed Giant, tried to outrace Athena, but she simply picked up a titanic chunk of earth and threw it at the monster. Enceladus lay flattened underneath the soil, which became the island of Sicily. Not to be outdone, Poseidon, god of the sea, broke off a sizable chunk of the island of Cos with his trident and hurled it at Polybutes. The Giant lay buried underneath this islet of Cos, ever since then called Nisyros. The end of the Giants was near. The remaining retreating offspring of Mother Earth made a last stand at Bathos, near Arcadian Trapezus. The Giant Hippolytus was next to expire, stricken down by Hermes, who had borrowed Hades' helmet of invisibility and had snuck up unseen on the creature. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, cut down Gration in mid stride, piercing him with her silver arrow. Thoas and Agrius were dispatched by the Fates, who were having a merry old time swinging their pestles and watching Giant heads split open. Zeus with his thunderbolts and Ares with his spear took care of all the rest. In all instances, Heracles stood nearby, ready to deposit an arrow in each fallen Giant. The Satyr Silenus, who was always found in the retinue of Dionysus, god of wine, claimed to have killed the Giant Enceladus while fighting at his master's side. He further embellished the story by bragging that it was the braying of his donkey that had initially spread panic among the Giants, scattering them. But nobody believed him, because Silenus was drunk most of the time and probably hallucinated the whole bloody affair... The Giants laying siege to Mount Olympus, home of the godslay dead, their revolt crushed, many of them buried under the earth and transformed into volcanoes; but that only made Mother Earth more upset. Not only were her children, the Titans, imprisoned in Tartarus, but now her beloved Giants had been slaughtered. What's a mother to do? Mother Earth lay with Tartarus and created Typhon, the largest monster ever born. This hideous creature was next to challenge Zeus and the Olympians, and challenge them he did. Good thing Athena was around. But that's another story...