Part 1
The Ages of (Wo)Man
Two stones big enough to fill a cart lie at the ravine’s edge. These stones are clay-coloured – not the colour of earth-like clay, but like that found in a ravine or a sandy stream; and the stones smell very much like human flesh. The locals say that these stones are remnants of the clay from which humankind was shaped by Prometheus.
PAUSANIA’s GUide to greece 4.1
Not all the Titans fought against Zeus. One who was his ally was Prometheus, who bears a name linked to the concepts of ‘forethought’ and ‘planning ahead’. In the days when Cronos still ruled the heavens, Prometheus had fashioned a creature called man to walk the earth. As Ovid explains in his Metamorphoses: ‘He took the rainwater, which has still something of the heavens, and mixed this with the earth into a creature never seen before. For, while other animals look to the ground, this creature could turn its face to the stars, and see there his likeness in the gods who are masters of all.’ Nor was this merely a physical likeness, as will be seen below.
The Age of Gold
Let this age of iron cease, and a
[new] Golden Age arise.
VIRGIL eclogues 4.9ff
Early humans were exclusively male. And in the ‘Age of Gold’ described by Hesiod, theirs was a bachelor existence. ‘They lived without care or trouble … their banquets were free from evil … and all good things belonged to them.’ What happened to end this idyll is confused, and the many different tellings of the tale can never fully be reconciled. But it would appear that a clash of divine wills brought about both the end of the Golden Age and, not coincidentally, the creation of woman.
Tricking Zeus
Prometheus wanted the best for his creation, yet he accepted that men must sacrifice to the gods. So he prepared an ox for the dinner of Zeus, arranging the bones in one portion artfully beneath a layer of fat, while the other portion had meat and nourishing innards all carelessly thrown down and covered by the ox’s paunch. ‘Take your pick of these portions, great Zeus,’ said the cunning Titan, ‘and after the sacrifice the other portion shall go to humans.’ Zeus easily saw through the trick, and was angered by the attempt. Nevertheless he took the fat and the bones, and the gods ever after had to be content with these when an animal was sacrificed. But there was a price to be paid for offering the gods the lesser share, and for the presumption of Prometheus. Zeus decided that this punishment would be harm to mankind, the Titan’s beloved creation.
Prometheus steals fire
Zeus decreed that humans were to be denied the secret of fire, a lack that would keep them in primitive savagery and barely one step ahead of the animals. But stubborn Prometheus sneaked fire to his protégés, by hiding it in a hollow reed. And when Zeus later looked out over the earth and saw the stars in the heavens mirrored by fires in human settlements on the ground, he knew that Prometheus had defied him.
His wrath was terrible. He ordered the gentle Titan to be chained to a rock in the distant Caucasus mountains and then sent there an eagle to eat the prisoner’s liver. The immortal Prometheus could not die, and overnight his liver grew back, to be agonizingly eaten again the next day.
The wrath of Zeus – the excruciating punishments of Atlas and Prometheus.
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later art and culture:
prometheus
The legend of Prometheus has powerful themes of self-sacrifice, altruism, suffering and redemption, which, unsurprisingly, have evoked responses in all the arts. In drama and verse Percy Bysshe Shelley produced his dramatic reworking of the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound. In the twentieth century Prometheus was an opera by the German composer Rudolf Wagner-Régeny.
In painting there have been many interpretations of the myth, from Piero di Cosimo’s Myth of Prometheus, 1515, to Dirck van Baburen’s Prometheus Being Chained by Vulcan, 1623. Gustave Moreau gave an expressionist twist to the theme in the nineteenth century, a time when the partition of Poland also evoked The Polish Prometheus (1831), in which the artist Horace Vernet depicted Poland as a recumbent soldier on whom the Russian eagle is feeding.The theme is best depicted in marble by the 1762 statuette by Nicolas-Sébastien Adam, which is now in the Louvre.
Prométhée Enchaîné, which took the sculptor Adam twenty-seven years to produce.
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Pandora
Hephaestus, at Zeus’ command, made a woman’s
body from clay. Athena gave it life, and the rest
of the gods each gave some other gift. Because
of these gifts they named her Pandora
[‘All-giving’]. … Pyrrha was her daughter.
hyginus fabulae 142
Still furious, Zeus now turned his attention to mankind itself. In order to harm them, Zeus prepared ‘a beautiful evil to balance the blessing of fire’, namely Pandora. Zeus’ fellow gods – some of whom were, after all, female – gave to the creation of Hephaestus a dowry of many gifts for mankind so as to soften the blow. But the gifts Pandora received needed to be trained to serve humanity, and until then were kept in a huge urn – which later ages have refigured as ‘Pandora’s box’.
Pandora emerges from the ground.
Zeus, however, gave to Pandora a ‘gift’ that would undo the work of his fellow gods: an unshakeable curiosity. Hardly had Pandora arrived on the earth when she opened the lid to see what the urn contained. Immediately the creatures in the container flew out, and being as yet untrained to serve humanity they became instead despair, jealousy and rage and the myriad diseases and infirmities that afflict humanity. All that remained was hope, which became trapped under the unbreakable rim of the urn, and which mankind was able to train and make a friend, as the other ‘gifts’ in the urn had been intended to be, though in ways which we cannot now imagine.
‘So,’ says Hesiod, at his crabby, inexcusably misogynistic best, ‘from Pandora came the ruinous breed of women, an affliction to live with men … and take the fruits of his toil into her own belly.’ And subtle and cunning indeed was Zeus, for ‘whoever flees marriage comes yet to a pitiful end, alone and destitute of family’.
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later art and culture:
pandora
Unsurprisingly Pandora’s story has been retold many times in paintings, sculpture and music, some notable examples being: Pandora, an opera of 1690 by Gennaro Ursino; a marble statue of 1864 by the American sculptor Chauncey Bradley Ives; and paintings which range from Jean Cousin c. 1550 to the nineteenth century (Lawrence Alma Tadema, J. W. Waterhouse, Paul Césaire Gariot) and numerous modern works. Pandora can still be seen on earth and in the heavens. She is a moon of Saturn, an asteroid, a small town in Ohio and another in Texas, and also an island in the Canadian Arctic. She has given her name to a string of Royal Navy warships serving between 1779 and 1942, a subspecies of Sphinx moth and a publishing house.