by Stephen Fry
‘I really loved that shade of cobalt blue.’
Athena was looking down at the intact figures which lay glowing in the dying rays of the sun. ‘Oh Prometheus, they’re perfect,’ she said in the mild voice that commanded more attention than the roars and screams of the other Olympians. Prometheus cheered up at once. Praise from Athena meant everything.
‘Well, I did pretty much put my heart and soul into them.’
‘Fine job, really fine,’ said Zeus. ‘Formed by a great Titan from Gaia’s clay, they are held together by my royal saliva and fired by the sun and shall be brought to life by the gentle breath of my daughter.’
It was Metis, always inside Zeus, who had sparked the thought in him that it should be Athena who brought these creatures to life. She would breathe into each one, literally inspiring them with some of her great qualities of wisdom, instinct, craft and sense.
A Name Is Found
Kneeling down on the bank of the river Athena breathed her warm sweet breath into each of the little statues. When she had finished she stood to join Prometheus and her father, looking on to see what would transpire.
It all happened quite slowly.
At first one of the darker figures gave a twitch and let out a kind of gasping moan.
At the other end of the row a yellow one wriggled, sat up and gave a small cough.
Within seconds all the little beings were alive and moving. Just moments later they were trying out their limbs, eyes and other senses, looking at each other, smelling the air, chattering and shouting. Before long they were standing and even taking their first wobbling steps.
Zeus took Prometheus by both his hands and danced him round and round.
‘Look!’ he shouted. ‘Look! Aren’t they beautiful! They’re wonderful, quite wonderful!’
Athena raised a finger to her lips. ‘Sh! You’re frightening them.’ She pointed down at the tiny men who were now staring up with looks of fear and consternation on their faces. The tallest of them didn’t quite come up to the level of her knees.
‘It’s alright, little ones,’ said Zeus stooping down and addressing them in what he hoped was a soothing voice. ‘There’s no need to be afraid!’
But the colossal booming sound that emerged seemed to alarm the little creatures further and they began to flail and whirl about in alarm.
‘Let’s reduce ourselves to their size,’ said Prometheus. As he spoke he shrank himself down so that he was only a foot or so taller than his creations. Zeus and Athena did the same.
With embraces, smiles and soft words, the scared and bewildered beings were slowly pacified and befriended. They clustered around the three immortals, bowing and prostrating themselves.
‘There’s no need to bow,’ said Prometheus, touching one of them and marvelling at the texture and life he could feel pounding within. Athena’s breath had turned the clay into such quick, warm flesh. The eyes of them all were bright with life and energy and hope.
‘Excuse me,’ said Zeus, ‘there is every need to bow. We are their gods and they are not to forget it.’
‘I’m not their god,’ said Prometheus, gazing down on them with an intense feeling of love and pride. ‘I am their friend.’ He knelt so that he was lower than them. ‘I shall teach them how to farm, how to mill wheat and rye so that they can make bread. How to cook and forge tools and –’
‘No!’ Zeus gave a sudden roar that sent the startled creatures milling in panic again. Zeus’s roar was answered by a great rumble of thunder in the sky. ‘You can befriend them as much as you like, Prometheus, and I have no doubt that Athena and all the other gods will do so too. But one thing they are not to have. Ever. And that is fire.’
Prometheus stared at his friend in astonishment. ‘But … but why ever not?’
‘With fire they could rise up to challenge us. With fire they could think themselves our equals. I feel it and know it. They must never be given fire. I have spoken.’
A long peal of thunder in the distance affirmed his words.
‘But,’ Zeus smiled now, ‘everything else in the world is theirs to enjoy. They may travel to every corner. They can sail Poseidon’s oceans, seek Demeter’s help in sowing seeds and growing food, learn from Hestia the arts of keeping a home, discover how to keep animals for their milk, fur and labour, and they can learn the arts of hunting from Artemis. Hermes can teach them guile, Apollo can instruct them in the arts of music and knowledge. Athena will teach them how to be wise and contented. And Aphrodite will share with them the arts of love. They will be free and happy.’
‘What shall we call them?’ Athena asked.
‘ “That which is below”,’ said Zeus after some thought. ‘Anthropos.’fn3
He clapped his hands and the huddle of hand-crafted humans became a hundred and the hundred became a horde and the horde, spreading ever outwards, became a multitude, until the human population, numbering now in the hundreds of thousands, was on its way to finding a home in every corner of the world.
And so the early race of man came to be. Gaia, Zeus, Apollo and Athena might be said to be its progenitors as much as Prometheus, who fashioned humanity from the four elements: Earth (Gaia’s clay), Water (the spittle of Zeus), Fire (the sun of Apollo) and Air (the breath of Athena). They lived and thrived, exemplifying the best of their creators. But something was missing. Something very important.
The Golden Age
Alma Mater, the bountiful Mother Earth, made fertile and fruitful by Demeter, was a sweet paradise for the first men. They knew no disease, poverty, famine or war. Life was an idyll of innocence and light pastoral duties. It was a time of happy worship of, and familiarity and even friendship with, the deities who moved amongst them in easy, unfrightening shapes and dimensions. It gave Zeus and the other gods, Titans and immortals great pleasure to mingle with the charming, childlike homunculi that Prometheus has shaped from clay.
Perhaps we only imagined these first days of beautiful simplicity and universal kindness so that we could have a high point of paradisal sublimity against which to judge the low, degraded times that came after. The later Greeks certainly believed that the Golden Age had truly existed. It was ever present in their thinking and poetry and gave them a dream of perfection to aspire to, a vision more concrete and realized than our own vague ideas of early man grunting in caves. Platonic ideals and perfect forms were perhaps the intellectual expression of that wistful race memory.
It was natural that, of all the immortals, the one who loved humankind best should be their artist-creator Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus now spent more time living with man than they spent on Olympus in the company of their fellow immortals.
It saddened Prometheus that he had only been allowed to create male people, for he felt that this cloned single-sex race lacked variety both in its outlook, disposition and character and in its inability to breed and create new types. His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged and unchallenging existence had no zest to it. To approach the godlike status that his creation deserved, mankind needed something more. They needed fire. Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion and forge; and they needed an inner creative fire too, a divine fire, to enable them to think, imagine, dare and do.
The more he watched over and mingled with his creation, the more Prometheus became convinced that fire was exactly what they needed. And he knew where to find it.
The Fennel Stalk
Prometheus surveyed the twin crowns of Olympus towering above him. The tallest peak, Mytikos, reached nearly ten thousand podes high into the clouds. Next to it, two or three hundred or so feet lower but much harder to climb, reared the rocky face of Stefani. To the west loomed the heights of Skolio. Prometheus knew that the dying rays of the evening sun would shield that climb – the toughest of all – from the gods enthroned above, and so he began the perilous ascent confident that he could reach the summit unseen.
Promet
heus had never disobeyed Zeus before. Not in anything big. In games and races and wrestling matches and competitions to win the hearts of nymphs he had freely teased and taunted his friend, but he had never defied him outright. The hierarchy of the pantheon was not something any being could disrupt without real consequences. Zeus was a beloved friend, but he was, above all, Zeus.
Yet Prometheus was determined on his course of action. Much as he had always loved Zeus, he found that he loved mankind more. The excitement and resolution he felt were stronger than any fear of divine wrath. He hated to cross his friend, but when it came to a choice, there was no choice.
By the time he had scaled Skolio’s sheer wall, the western gates had closed upon Apollo’s chariot of the sun and the whole mountain was shrouded in darkness. Crouching low, Prometheus made his way around the jagged outcrop that crested the bowl-like amphitheatre of Megala Kazania. Looking ahead he could see the Plateau of the Muses beyond, flickering with dancing licks of light thrown by the fires of Hephaestus’s forge several hundred podes or so further off.
Around the other side of Olympus the gods were supping. Prometheus could hear Apollo’s lyre, Hermes’ fluting syrinx, the raucous laugh of Ares and the snarling of Artemis’s hounds. Hugging the outer walls of the forge the Titan edged along to its forecourt. He was startled, as he rounded the corner, to see stretched out naked on the ground the huge figure of Brontes snoring by the fire. Prometheus hung back in the shadows. He knew that the Cyclopes assisted Hephaestus, but that they might sleep on the premises was more than he had bargained for.
At the very mouth of the forge he saw a narthex plant, sometimes called the laserwort or giant fennel (Ferula communis) – not quite the same bulbous vegetable we use today to impart a pleasant aniseedy flavour to fish, but a near enough relation. Prometheus leaned forward and picked a long, vigorous specimen. Tightly packed within there was a thick, lint-like pith. Stripping the stem of its outer leaves Prometheus stretched out and pushed the stalk across the forecourt, over Brontes’ slumbering, mumbling form and towards the fire. The heat emanating from the furnace was enough to cause the end of the stalk to catch at once. Prometheus pulled it back in with as much care as he could, but he could not prevent a spark from falling from its sputtering end straight down onto Brontes’ torso. The skin on the Cyclops’s chest sizzled and hissed and he awoke with a roar of pain. As Brontes looked groggily down at his chest, trying to understand where this pain was coming from and what it could mean, Prometheus hauled in the stalk and fled.
The Gift of Fire
Prometheus clambered back down Olympus, the fennel stalk clenched between his teeth, its pith burning slowly. Every five minutes or so he would take it from his mouth and blow gently, nursing its glow. When he at last reached the safety of the valley floor he made his way to the human settlement where he and his brother had made their home.
You may say that Prometheus could surely have had the wit to teach man to strike stones together, or rub sticks, but we have to remember that what Prometheus stole was fire from heaven, divine fire. Perhaps he took the inner spark that ignited in man the curiosity to rub sticks and strike flints in the first place.
When he showed men the leaping, dancing darting demon they initially cried out in fear and backed away from its flames. But their curiosity soon overcame their fear and they began to delight in this magical new toy, substance, phenomenon – call it what you will. They learned from Prometheus that fire was not their enemy but a powerful friend which, once tamed, had ten thousand thousand uses.
Prometheus moved from village to village demonstrating techniques for the fashioning of tools and weapons, the firing of earthen pots, the cooking of meat and the baking of cereal doughs, all of which quickly let loose an avalanche of advantages, raising man above the animal prey that had no answer to metal-tipped spears and arrows.
It was not long before Zeus chanced to look down from Olympus and saw points of dancing orange light dotting the landscape all around. He knew at once what had happened. Nor did he need to be told who was responsible. His anger was swift and terrible. Never had such almighty, such tumultuous, such apocalyptic fury been witnessed. Not even Ouranos in his mutilated agony had been so filled with vengeful rage. Ouranos was brought low by a son he had no regard for, but Zeus had been betrayed by the friend he loved most. No betrayal could be more terrible.
The Punishments
The Gift
Zeus’s wrath was so overwhelming that all Olympus feared Prometheus would be blasted with such power that his atoms would never reassemble. It is possible that just such a fate might have befallen the once-favoured Titan had not the wise and stabilizing presence of Metis inside Zeus’s head counselled a subtler and more dignified revenge. The intensity of his rage was in no way dimmed, but rather it was now focussed, channelled into clearer lines of retribution. He would leave Prometheus for the time being and unleash his cosmic fury upon man, puny impudent man, the creature he had taken such delight in and for whom now he felt nothing but resentment and cold contempt.
For a whole week, watched by a grave and concerned Athena, the King of the Gods paced up and down in front of his throne considering how best humans should pay for daring to appropriate fire, for presuming to ape the Olympians. A voice within him seemed to whisper that one day, no matter what vengeance he took, mankind would reach ever upwards until they came level with the gods – or, perhaps more terribly, until they no longer needed the gods and felt free to abandon them. No more worship, no more prayers sent up to heavenly Olympus. The prospect was too blasphemous and absurd for Zeus to entertain, but the fact that such a scandalous idea could even enter his mind served only to fuel his rage.
Whether the magnificent scheme that was finally put into operation was his or Metis’s or even Athena’s is unclear, but it was, Zeus believed, a screamer of a plan. There was a golden symmetry to it that appealed to his very Greek mind. He would show Prometheus and, by heaven, he would show mankind.
First he commanded Hephaestus to do as Prometheus had done, to shape a human being from clay moistened by his spittle. But this was to be the figure of a young female. Taking his wife Aphrodite, his mother Hera, his aunt Demeter and his sister Athena as models, Hephaestus lovingly sculpted a girl of quite marvellous beauty into whom Aphrodite then breathed life and all the arts of love.
The other gods joined together to equip this girl uniquely for the world. Athena trained her in the household crafts, embroidery and weaving, and dressed her in a glorious silver robe. The Charites were put in charge of accessorizing this with necklaces, brooches and bracelets of the finest pearl, agate, jasper and chalcedony. The Horai plaited flowers around her hair until she was so beautiful that all who saw her caught their breath. Hera endowed her with poise and self-possession. Hermes schooled her in speech and the arts of deception, curiosity and cunning. And he gave her a name. Since each of the gods had conferred upon her a notable talent or accomplishment, she was to be called ‘All-Gifted’, which in Greek is PANDORA.fn1
Hephaestus bestowed one more gift upon this paragon, which Zeus presented himself. It was a container filled with … secrets.
Now, you probably think I am going to say the container was a box, or perhaps a chest of some description, but in fact it was the kind of glazed and sealed earthenware jar that is known in Grecian lands as a pithos.fn2
‘Here you are, my dear,’ said Zeus. ‘Now, this is purely decorative. You are never ever to open it. You understand?’
Pandora shook her lovely head. ‘Never,’ she breathed with great sincerity. ‘Never!’
‘There’s a good girl. It is your wedding gift. Bury it deep below your marriage bed, but you must not open it. Ever. What it contains … well, never mind. Nothing of interest to you at all.’
Hermes took Pandora by the hand and transported her to the little stone house where Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus lived, right in the centre of a prosperous human town.
The Brothers
P
rometheus knew that Zeus would seek some kind of retribution for his disobedience and warned his brother Epimetheus that, while he was away teaching the newly sprung up villages and towns how to use fire, he should on no account accept any gift from Olympus, no matter in what guise it presented itself.
Epimetheus, who always acted first and considered the consequences later, promised to obey his more perspicacious brother.
Nothing could prepare him for Zeus’s gift, however.
Epimetheus answered a knock at the door one morning to see the cheerful smiling face of the messengers of the gods.
‘May we come in?’ Hermes stepped nimbly aside to reveal, cradling a stoneware jar in her arms, the most beautiful creature Epimetheus had ever seen. Aphrodite was beautiful, of course she was, but too remote and ethereal to be considered as anything other than a subject of veneration and distant awe. Likewise Demeter, Artemis, Athena, Hestia and Hera. Their loveliness was majestic and unattainable. The prettiness of nymphs, oreads and Oceanids, while enchanting enough, seemed shallow and childish next to the blushing sweetness of the vision that looked up at him so shyly, so winningly, so adorably.
‘May we?’ repeated Hermes.
Epimetheus gulped, swallowed and stepped backwards, opening the door wide.
‘Meet your wife to be,’ said Hermes. ‘Her name is Pandora.’
When It’s a Jar
Epimetheus and Pandora were soon married. Epimetheus had an inkling that Prometheus – who was far away teaching the art of casting in bronze to the people of Varanasi – would not approve of Pandora. A quick wedding before his brother returned seemed a good idea.
Epimetheus and Pandora were very much in love. That could not be denied. Pandora’s beauty and attainments were such as to delight him every day, and in return his facile ability to live always for the moment and never to fret about the future gave her a sense of life as a light and lovely adventure.