Prometheus (1 of 3) Evolution of the myth

For unit five, I asked you to read three different texts by two different authors telling basically the same story. The same basic character development, same events with a couple of exceptions. And what you probably found was they both told that story very differently. The character of Prometheus might be familiar to us. There's the statue in the 30 Rockefeller Center of Prometheus, the golden statue in the fountain. He's been the subject of lots of works of art. Prometheus has been depicted as a romantic hero by the romantic poets of England like Byron and Shelley. George Gordon, Lord Byron wrote a poem called Prometheus in which he praised Prometheus as this sort of rebel who was willing to sacrifice himself in order to improve the lot of humanity. His friend and fellow romantic poet Percy Shelley wrote a much longer play called Prometheus Unbound which clearly the title is in reference to Aeschylus' play. But in this, Prometheus is sort of victorious over the oppressive power of Zeus. But of course, his wife Mary Shelley, the author of the novel Frankenstein, used the modern Prometheus as the subtitle for her novel. Instead of seeing him purely as this sort of romantic hero, Mary Shelley depicts Prometheus as somebody who through technology, through pushing the bounds of what is permitted for human beings to do, he is trying to improve things but he opens up the door of this, he exposes people to danger that he did not predict. It's in that sense of this dangerous cautionary tale that the Ridley Scott movie, alien movie Prometheus picks up in Mary Shelley's use of the term or use of the name Prometheus rather than Percy Shelley and Lord Byron's use of the term. But these two versions, obviously I'm referring to depictions of Prometheus over the last couple hundred years, that's way out of the historical context that we're reading here when we read Hesiod and Aeschylus. But you'll see that even 2,500 years later, we still have this wrestling over how to depict Prometheus. Was he foolish and did he do something wrong by pushing the limits, by breaking the divinely ordained boundaries about what human beings are allowed to become? Or was this a good thing or was this a bad thing? Is this a cautionary tale or is this a romantic hero? And we'll see when we compare Hesiod, Prometheus' character in the works and days in the Theogony with Aeschylus' character in Prometheus Bound, we'll see that that division did not begin in the Romantic era. That goes all the way back as far as we have texts in reference to Prometheus. So something's going on that despite all the cultural changes, all the historical changes over the last two and a half millennia, we still, there's something about this character that divides people, that divides our interpretations. And we'll try to explore what that might be and how that might work and why those two portrayals are so endearing, why they've lasted so long. And so we're moving further west than we've been so far. We started out in Mesopotamia. So we're entering the Golden Age of Greece, situated primarily in Athens, spread around the Peloponnesus Peninsula. But Greece is really coming into its own in art and philosophy and literature. It's just now picking up, during Hesiod's time, the Greek script, the Greek alphabet is very new. It's been developed from the Phoenician alphabet and the Phoenician alphabet was developed eventually from cuneiform. But it's been through centuries and centuries of changes. And so we read accounts about Prometheus from two different authors. So in order to distinguish between the Prometheus we may know through modern culture and the Prometheus we're dealing with now, we can pull some facts, pull the basic story, the basic plot together out of reading both Hesiod and Aeschylus. Hesiod tells us that, he describes Prometheus as clever Prometheus, full of various wiles. And that's an English translation. The Greek would be Promethea poikilon aileometin. And that poikilon, the word poikilon, means literally like a weaver, someone who weaves a fabric, takes different threads and interweaves them. And aileometin is a combination, it's a compound word made from the word for sort of quick or shifting, as well as the word metis, which we're gonna come back to when we talk about Odysseus. But this word metis doesn't have a very good English one-word translation. But it means sort of, it's strategies, it's wiliness, it's cleverness, but it's not necessarily that sort of duplicitous cleverness. It's a sort of quick wit, maybe. And not quick wit in the sense of conversation, but when the world sort of overwhelms you, it seems like there's no way out, there's no way to succeed. The person with metis is able to see a way through, to see a solution to a problem that no one else sees. Well, so clever Prometheus tricks Zeus so that at this first sacrifice, after the creation of humans, at Mekoni, this place where humans come to give their first sacrifices to the gods, they're going to have to sacrifice part of an ox. And if they have to sacrifice the part, if they have to sacrifice the meat, then they're not going to have the meat to eat. So Prometheus wants to help humans, and he arranges the parts of the ox into two parts. He covers the bones and the hooves and that sort of thing in fat so that the glistening fat looks like, you know, good, like marbled steak. But then he takes the actual, the lean meat, and puts it aside. And he says to Zeus, choose between these two. He chooses the one that looks better, that is the one with the fat on top, but the bones and hooves in the bottom. And so that's why human beings sacrifice only those parts to the gods in Hesiod's time. This is the ideology of why humans, or why sacrifices happen the way they do. And for that, Zeus is angry with humans, he's angry with Prometheus, so he takes fire, and he hides fire and other technology away from humans. But Prometheus wants to help humans out again, so he steals fire from the gods. Either steals it from Zeus's thunderbolt, or he steals it from Hephaestus's forage, you know, the smith god. And for stealing fire, he's, according to Hesiod, bound with inextricable bonds, cruel chains, a shaft through his middle. And he's attacked by an eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver. But by night, the liver grew as much again, every way as the long-winged bird devoured it in the whole day. So we may have, if you've heard anything about Prometheus, it's probably these two things. He stole fire from the gods, and he was, you know, chained, and an eagle, like, tore his liver out every day, and then every night, the liver grew back. Eventually, we're told that he was freed by Heracles, and remember that Heracles is the older name for the character that would become the Roman, Hercules. So I may even slip up, because we frequently call these gods by their Greek name, but sometimes, even when we're talking about the Greek version, we use the Roman name. Hercules is the Roman name, it's a much younger name. Heracles is the older name. And in addition to this, in addition to what we read in Hesiod, Aeschylus tells us that Prometheus is able to see the future, so his name literally means forethinker, or someone who thinks ahead. But in Aeschylus, he seems to be prophetic. He seems to know everything that's going to happen in the future, at least a lot of things that are gonna happen in the future. He's devoted to mankind. This is where his opposition to Zeus derives from. He's got this desire to help humanity in spite of the danger it causes him. He gives humanity fire, as well as reason. So he doesn't just give humanity the ability to make fire. He also teaches people to think critically, to open their eyes, as he says, because he says that humans were like animals before. They could see, or they could open their eyes, but they couldn't really see. They could hear things, but they couldn't discern what they were hearing. He gives them the ability to build houses from brick and from wood, whereas before, people lived in caves. He gives them the ability to measure time and the seasons, to watch the stars, to decide what season it is. He gives them mathematics. He gives them writing. He shows them how to domesticate animals. He shows them how to weave sails and build ships. He teaches them how to make medicine to heal themselves when they have diseases. And he teaches them divination, how to read the future, which, to the Greeks at the time, was just as real a science as math or anything else. And in Aeschylus, he knows how Zeus will one day be overthrown, but he doesn't tell. Even as he's being tortured, he refuses to tell, but something he knows is that Zeus, who has just come into power, has just overthrown his father, Cronos. Now, sometime in the future, Prometheus knows that somehow Zeus will be overthrown. And very importantly, he's no longer just this sort of trickster that he was in Hesiod. He's morally opposed to Zeus's abuse of power. He knows what he's doing. He's not just sort of being tricky. He's actively resisting Zeus's tyranny. So let's take a look at where we are in time. Hesiod is writing sometime around the year 700 BCE, and that's give or take 50 years. It may be 650, it may be 750, sometime in there. This is when he composes his works in days in the Theogony. A good 200 years later, we have Aeschylus. So we can say relatively comfortably that Aeschylus is deriving some of what he writes from Hesiod. Hesiod was well-known in the 5th century Athens, so very likely Hesiod would have been at least one source. But there seems to be other sources for the tradition of Prometheus, the stories of Prometheus, probably wouldn't have been solely dependent on Hesiod. Because we have other descriptions, other versions of the Prometheus story showing up around the first century of the Common Era. So the Roman poet Ovid, when he composes the Metamorphosis, which is a sort of encyclopedia of stories about the gods, and then shortly after that, and the work Bibliotheca, or the Library, by somebody who was once thought to be the writer Apollodorus, turns out later not to be Apollodorus, but they still call him Pseudo-Apollodorus. Both of these make references to the Prometheus myth, and they describe things that seem familiar from Hesiod and from Aeschylus, but also some things that we may not have heard before. When Ovid writes the Metamorphosis around year eight of the Common Era, he's got different versions of the myths that he's describing, and he's got to decide how do I tell this linear narrative if I have all of these different competing versions? This is a situation that any redactor finds themself in. Do I put them all in? Do I just choose one and leave out the others? So Ovid is redacting all of these different myths, and he's got to decide, well, I've heard about this sort of ambiguous creator divinity, but then I've also heard that human beings were created by Prometheus, so this is why he asks, did the unknown god designing then a better world make man of seed divine? Or did Prometheus take new soil of earth that still contains some godly element of heaven's life and use it to create the race of man, first mingling it with water of new streams so that his new creation, upright man, was made in the image of commanding gods? On earth, the brute creation bends its gaze, but man was given a lofty countenance and was commanded to behold the skies, and with an upright face may view the stars, and so it was that the shapeless clay put on the form of man till then unknown to earth. So notice that it's in Ovid's metamorphosis, it's not just Prometheus doing things for humanity, but he's, one of the versions of the story is he's creating humanity, and specifically, he's creating it from the soil of the earth that contains some godly element. This may sound familiar, this should take us all the way back to Atrahasis, when Enki and Belet-ili shape clay and they take this, the godly ghost of Iloela and use that, combine that ghost with the clay and out of that shape the first human beings. And then we have this account from Pseudo-Apollodorus. He says, Prometheus molded man out of water in earth and gave them also fire, which, unknown to Zeus, he had hidden in a stalk of fennel, this reed that grows in wet areas. But when Zeus learned of it, he ordered Hephaestus to nail his body to Mount Caucasus, which is a Scythian mountain. On it, Prometheus was nailed and kept bound for many years, every day an eagle swooped at him and devoured the lobes of his liver, which grew back by night. This was the penalty that Prometheus paid for the theft of fire until Hercules, because we're writing in the Roman times now, Hercules afterward released him, as we shall see in dealing with Hercules. And Prometheus had a son named Deucalion. He, reigning in the regions of Thea, married Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, the first woman fashioned by the gods. And when Zeus would destroy the men of the Bronze Age, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus, constructed a chest, and having stored it with provisions, he embarked in it with Pyrrha, his wife. But Zeus, by pouring heavy rain from heaven, flooded the greater part of Greece so that all men were destroyed, except a few who fled to higher mountains in the neighborhood. It was then that the mountains in Thessaly parted, and all the world outside the Isthmus and the Peloponnese were overwhelmed. But Deucalion, floating in the chest over the sea for nine days and as many nights, drifted to Parnassus. And there, when the rain ceased, he landed and sacrificed to Zeus. So we have a story about the son of Prometheus, by Prometheus' advice, looking ahead, knowing that a flood was coming that was gonna wipe out humanity. And it's he, by Prometheus' advice, he builds this chest, this large box, and provisions it, and is able to survive with his family. Until the end of the flood. And after that flood, he makes these sacrifices. This, these elements, at least, of this Prometheus story should sound familiar. Remember that Enki was frequently described as farsighted Enki, in other words, he who sees from far away. He was the creator of mankind, along with Nintu, or Belet-ili. He's the helper of mankind. He sends the seven sages to teach humans technology, art, and philosophy. And basically found civilization by taking these things that belong to the gods and giving them to humans. He's also a trickster, he deceives Elil. When Elil makes everyone promise not to warn humans, not to save humans, Enki says, okay, well, I'll just talk to this reed wall. And when he's talking to this reed wall, Atrahas overhears and understands that he has to build this ark. And through this, he directly, or indirectly, defies the chief god in order to save his favorite human from the flood. Also, if you read the introduction to Stephanie Daly's text of Atrahasis, she mentions that Atrahasis' name means extra wise. And she specifically mentions that, quote, Prometheus, Deucalion's father, may possibly be an approximate Greek translation of Atrahasis, the name, not the text. But Atrahasis, if translated into Greek, could have been translated as forethinker, or extra wise. And remember that Elil, the god who sends the flood, is the sort of reigning god, the god that rules over the younger generation of gods. Just as in both Hesiod and in Aeschylus, we read that Zeus has just taken over, he's just defeated his father Cronus, and now he reigns over this new generation of gods. And he's a storm god, just like Elil. He has lightning bolts as his weapons. And Enki's defiance of Elil isn't self-serving. And it's not something he apologizes for. He is very overt that he opposed Elil in order to preserve life, especially human life. He tells Atrahasis that if anyone asks him why he's going away, why he's building this ark, say, Enki and Elil have become angry with each other. And then Enki says himself, when Elil sees Atrahasis' ark and is furious, Enki says, and Elil asks, who did this? Who allowed humans to survive? And Enki, at that point, is proud of his defiance. He makes it explicit. He says, I did it in defiance of you. I made sure life was preserved. Exact your punishment from the center. Whoever contradicts your order, I have given vent to my feelings. We also have other stories about conflicts between gods of thunder and lightning, fighting gods or creatures or giants that are associated with fire. While they don't all have a lot in common with the Enki versus Elil story, they do frequently have some sort of element of a storm god having to fight a god of fire or a god of an underworld or a monster that breathes fire that lives in a cave or something to this effect. And there are several variations on the Prometheus myth that come from the Caucasus Mountains, this mountain chain between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. There's a hero named Nazran that goes to get fire from a giant that lives on Mount Elbrus, which is the tallest of the Caucasus Mountains. And this giant chains Nazran to the peak of Mount Elbrus and has an eagle whose wings are so large and dark that they block out the sun. This eagle sort of comes and attacks Nazran every day, tearing open his chest. And he's finally rescued when another hero named Bataras is able to kill the black-winged eagle. And another story about the same mountain involves a giant chained up inside it who causes tremors and is put down by storms. And you can see, if you think about how a volcano operates, especially an explosive volcano, when a volcano erupts, all of this hot gas and hot, superheated air, as well as the giant dust clouds that go up into the atmosphere, cause massive lightning storms. And so not only do you have the ground shaking and then this hot, liquid fire coming up out of the ground, but you also have these huge clouds above it blocking out the sun and these massive lightning bolts, the kind you would almost never see if it was just a natural storm caused by cold and hot air intermixing. Because the difference between the heat and the cold air, as well as these particles flying through the air, are so contrary. So witnessing a volcano would be the kind of thing that people would have to find an explanation for. It would be a schema they just had, or it would be something they had no schema in order to explain. So they would have to depend on the schemas that they already had, the scripts that they already had. Well, if we have a god for lightning and we believe in monsters and giants living under the earth, this is clearly a battle between those two monstrous forces. And so you can see imagery in a lot of these types of stories where a thunder god has to strike down someone, some supernatural force, who contains fire and is either thrown underground or dwells underground. Well, as we saw in the Pseudo-Apollodorus Bibliotheca, Prometheus is described as being chained up in the Caucasus Mountains. Also in the Argonautica, the epic of Jason and the Argonauts by Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century B.C., we're told that Jason and the Argonauts sail across the Black Sea and they moor their ship, the Argo, just on the Black Sea near the Caucasus Mountains. And they see the eagle flying overhead on its way to devour Prometheus's liver. And they hear the rumbling and the moaning of Prometheus in the distant mountains. Well, Elbrus erupted three times over the last 7,000 years. It erupted sometime between 5,500 and 5,200 B.C.E., then erupted again sometime between 3,300 and 2,600 B.C.E. So it's very possible that this story about a thunder god punishing this god of fire by locking him under the earth, specifically in the Caucasus Mountains, it's very likely that there was some sort of myth explaining an eruption, either the 5,500 B.C.E. or the 3,300 B.C.E. eruption of Mount Elbrus coming from that area at that time. So it's entirely possible that we've got this sort of chain of stories, or actually two separate chains of stories, emerging somewhere. So if we look at where the Caucasus Mountains are and imagine a story about these warring gods, one god, a storm god punishing the fire god, coming down into the Hittite Empire, which keep in mind is a literate empire, almost as early as the Babylonian Empire and the Mesopotamian Empires. If we can imagine this story making its way down into Hittite territory, and at the same time, the story about Enki preserving humanity, giving humanity these tools of the gods, including a fire, also making humanity, and warring with his fellow god, Elil, the storm god. Although, remember, Enki never gets punished, he never gets thrown down or tormented or anything like that. But it's possible that these stories coming from these two different civilizations were similar enough that they could merge, they could have been fused into one story somewhere in the Hittite Empire or shortly thereafter. And this becomes even more likely when we think of our earliest source that we just read, which is Hesiod. Hesiod's father, he tells us in Works and Days, came from the city of Kume, which is south of Troy. So it's in the Anatolian Peninsula, it's in modern-day Turkey. And so it's close to an offshoot of the Hittite Empire centuries later. And it's entirely possible that he's taking this story with him, his father is, or an entire group, an expatriate group from Kima, we're told, settles in Boeotia, which is this rural region to the west of Athens. So while this is speculative, we do have bits and pieces of evidence that we could sort of imagine, we could link together. So we know how myth works. It's a story that isn't each individual narrative, but it's the pool of narratives and the pool of ideas and story elements that each individual narrator, writer, bard, playwright, chooses from. And each of these may be iterations of not just one story, but two different stories, or maybe many more than that, that have become fused. This idea is explained more fully in the book When They Severed Earth from Sky by Elizabeth Whelan Barber and Paul T. Barber, which is, I've mentioned in the past, it's a great book if you're interested in mythology and how mythology works, especially explaining mythology from a psychological perspective. And we've talked about this kind of thing before. I mentioned how the Norse god Thor in 20th century American comic book culture had already been through many sort of iterations, many different versions. But the comic book version, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe version played by Chris Hemsworth owes as much, and maybe more to the Superman character than it does to the actual Norse god. But we see these two characters sort of fuse. We see the old Scandinavian god sort of losing many of his characteristics and picking up some of the characteristics of this hero that flies through the air with a red cape. We also saw this in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Remember I mentioned that King Shulgi, around the year 2150 BCE, long before even the old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, before it became an epic, there were all these individual fragments, individual stories, and very possible that the historical king named Gilgamesh, his story may have merged with stories about this hero who wrestled lions and wild bulls and this sort of thing. And so while we can't be certain that this is the origin of our idea of Prometheus, we do have enough evidence to make that argument, to make that interpretive claim. And that's one of the things we have to be able to do in this class. We are never gonna have all the historical context we need. We're never gonna have, especially in the time period we're dealing with, because we're dealing with these fragments of individual text, but also fragments, broken up across centuries. We have to make some interpretive inferences. Now, how we make those interpretive inferences is extremely important. We wanna make them carefully, but we can make these arguments. And this is the kind of thing you're going to do when you write a paper in this class. You're going to make an argumentative claim, you're going to make an interpretive claim, and say, if we look at this, we can see this happening. But you always need to have evidence. You always need to have the premises that lead to that conclusion.