Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

The gods (so Protagoras tells Socrates) decided to populate nature with new strains of mortal life, there being only immortals in the world at that time. Out of earth and water and with divine fire and divine breath they created animals and man. They charged Prometheus and Epimetheus with the task of allocating to these creatures all the attributes and characteristics that would enable them to live fulfilled and successful lives. Epimetheus said he would do the distributing and Prometheus could come and check up on his work. This the brothers agreed upon.

Epimetheus set to with a will. He gave armour to some animals – the rhinoceros, the pangolin and the armadillo, for instance. To others, almost at random it seemed, he handed out heavy weatherproof fur, camouflage, venom, feathers, tusks, talons, scales, claws, gills, wings, whiskers and goodness knows what else. He assigned speed and ferocity, he apportioned buoyancy and airworthiness – every animal was fitted out with its own cleverly designed and efficient speciality, from navigational skills to expertise in burrowing, nest-building, swimming, leaping and singing. He was just congratulating himself for providing the bats and dolphins with echolocation when he realized that this had been the very last of the available gifts. He had, with his characteristic lack of foresight, completely omitted to consider what he would bestow on man – poor, naked, vulnerable, smooth-skinned, two-legged man.

Epimetheus went guiltily to his brother and asked what they should do now that there was nothing left at the bottom of the gift basket. Man had no defences with which to arm himself against the cruelty, cunning and rapacity of these now superbly provisioned animals. The very powers that had been lavished on the beasts would surely finish off weaponless mankind.

Prometheus’s solution was to steal the arts from Athena and flame from Hephaestus. With these, man could use wisdom, wit and industry to pit himself against the animals. He might not swim as well as a fish, but he could work out how to build boats; he might not run as swiftly as a horse, but he could learn to tame, shoe and ride one. One day he might even construct wings to rival those of the birds.

Somehow then, by accident and error, man alone of all mortal creatures was given qualities from Olympus – not so that he could rival the gods, but merely so that he could fend off the more perfectly equipped animals.

Prometheus’s name means, as I have said, ‘forethought’. Forethought has far-reaching implications. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (1945) has this to say:

The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant … True forethought only arises when a man does something towards which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date … the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to his future.

This is perhaps a way of suggesting that Prometheus is father of our civilization in a way more subtle than as the provider of fire, whether real or symbolic. Prometheus also bequeathed us this quality of forethought, of being able to act beyond impulse. Was it Promethean forethought that raised us from being from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, town dwellers and traders? You do not toil and plant, plan and build, store and exchange unless you are capable of looking to the future.

Lest we take worship of the potentially Christlike and ideal Prometheus too far (a favourite Greek motto was, after all, mēdén ágan ‘nothing too much’), Russell reminds us that the Greeks seemed to be aware of a need to counter his influence with darker, deeper, less stable passions:

It is evident that this process [acting on prudence and forethought] can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.