The Prometheus Myth is often taken as foundational for modern Western Civilisation. This observation is more significant than it may appear to be at first sight, given that the Prometheus Myth as generally told has been truncated.
Just about every educated person knows the story as follows. The gods assign the task of distributing the characteristics and abilities of all living creatures to Prometheus, a Titan renowned for his wisdom and whose name means Fore-Thought. Epimetheus, whose name means After-Thought, begs his brother Prometheus to be given this task to do himself, and Prometheus agrees. So off Epimetheus goes, giving claws and teeth to the lions in order to be able to catch gazelles, and speed to the gazelles in order to escape the lions, strong digging paws to moles, tails to help fish swim and so on. All goes well until Epimetheus comes to human beings and finds that he has run out of things to give away. So there the human beings are, naked and shivering and vulnerable, helpless to manage for themselves in this hostile world. He goes back to Prometheus to report his failure to complete the task properly and so Prometheus sets forth to rectify the situation. He goes and steals fire from the gods and gives this fire to humans so that they can thereby be enabled to take care of themselves. Zeus is enraged by this theft and has Prometheus chained to a mountainside, where every day an eagle comes and gnaws away his liver, which then grows back during the night, only to be eaten away again the next day. This lamentable state of affairs is intended to continue forever without alteration, such is the harshness of Zeus’ punishment, but eventually Hercules comes along and rescues Prometheus from this fate.
Modern Western Civilisation, whose origins are to be found in the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment, has taken its essential identity from this myth. The defiance of the gods as constituted by the overthrow of religion and the establishment of the secular order, the assertion of technology as the defining characteristic of the human being as instituted by the industrial revolution, and the separation from the natural world implied by being left out of the original sharing of the attributes of living creatures as fulfilled by urbanisation, have all come to pass in our modern atheistic technological urbanised world.
And there, as the saying goes, the matter rests.
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There is more to the story than this, however. Plato in the Protagoras goes on to tell the remaining part of the story, the part that is, not accidentally, left out of its modern tellings.
Zeus looks down from Olympus and sees that human beings, despite having the use of fire, continue to live in scattered bands dotted here and there about the landscape. He sees that without gathering together into large communities, humankind will never develop its potential. So he sends down Hermes to implant justice in all human beings, men, women and children, and once this has been done human beings begin to live in cities and develop civilisation. The gift of fire alone is not sufficient to set humanity on its trajectory from the caves to the stars, for technology cannot develop without the social setting in which knowledge, division of labour, co-operation, material resources and incentives can combine to drive the actual development of technology itself. And that social setting cannot emerge without an awareness of justice.
But even this re-telling is not sufficient to restore the Prometheus Myth to its full original significance. Plato tells us more about the actual theft itself. Prometheus sneaks into the workshop of Athena and Hephaestus, and steals the arts of civilisation from Athena, and fire from Hephaestus. The arts of civilisation enable articulate speech and the use of names, the invention of farming and transportation and houses and clothing and bedding, and these arts cannot be practised without the possession of fire, for these go together. But without the further gift of Zeus even all this is insufficient. The gift of Zeus is in fact two-fold, for he sends Hermes to implant both justice and respect for others, and these new powers of the human soul bring into play the art of politics, of which the art of war is a part, and thus it was that humans were empowered to make war on the beasts and protect the tender shoots of civilised life behind their city walls. This is the full story of the Prometheus Myth, a two-fold theft from the two deities Athena and Hephaestus and a two-fold gift from the two deities Zeus and Hermes.
The story bears close examination, but there is one obvious starting point for our continuing investigation, and that is the nature of justice.