{"it":{"id":"TX034","kind":"text","sub":"Greek/Roman","name":"Prometheus shapes man from clay (Apollodorus Bibl. 1.7.1; Ovid Met. 1.76-88; Pausanias 10.4.4)","place":"Held in several collections","date":"Apollodorus 1st-2nd c. CE; Ovid 8 CE","oldest":"medieval mss.","inst":"various","lang":"Greek/Latin","src":[232,571],"tags":["Europe"],"sum":"Greeks said a Titan shaped humans from clay and stole fire for them, punished forever.","why":"It is the Greek version of a story told worldwide: humans made from earth, then given a knowledge that brings punishment.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"List clay myths across this section.","rel":["TX002","TX036","TX048"],"hook":"At Panopeus, Pausanias saw two cart-sized stones said to smell of human skin: the clay left over from mankind."},"S":{"232":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus"],"571":["Apollodorus, Library 1.7.1 (Theoi translation)","https://www.theoi.com/Text/Apollodorus1.html"]},"rec":{"id":"TX034","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA135","a":"Non-human creator.","who":"AA writers","main":"Late literary version of clay motif.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Ovid Met. 1.76-88","q":"Prometheus mixes earth with rainwater into the image of the gods. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"Ovid trans. various","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus","mo":"clay"},{"ref":"Hesiod, Works and Days 60-63 (Evelyn-White)","q":"Zeus \"bade famous Hephaestus make haste and mix earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind\"","exact":"yes","tr":"H.G. Evelyn-White 1914 (PD)","url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/348","mo":"clay_or_earth"},{"ref":"Hesiod, Works and Days 70-71","q":"\"the famous Lame God moulded clay in the likeness of a modest maid\"","exact":"yes","tr":"H.G. Evelyn-White 1914 (PD)","url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/348","mo":"clay_or_earth"}],"tr":[{"by":"H.G. Evelyn-White","yr":"1914","t":"Hesiod (Gutenberg #348)","lic":"public domain","url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/348"}],"mo":[{"v":"clay_or_earth","ev":"P026","n":"possible Near East to Greece","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus"},{"v":"clay_or_earth","ev":"P047,P048","n":"Greek","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus"}],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Late literary version of clay motif.","alternative_reading":"Non-human creator.","alt_proponent":"AA writers","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Clay-of-Panopeus stone shown to Pausanias.","key_theme":"Prometheus moulds humans from water and earth","language":"Greek/Latin","physical_object_institution":"various","composition_date":"Apollodorus 1st-2nd c. CE; Ovid 8 CE","oldest_ms_date":"medieval mss.","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0582","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus"},{"id":"S2572","t":"Apollodorus, Library 1.7.1 (Theoi translation)","u":"https://www.theoi.com/Text/Apollodorus1.html"},{"id":"VTX034-3","t":"PAUSANIAS, DESCRIPTION OF GREECE 10.1-16 - Theoi Classical Texts Library","u":"https://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias10A.html"},{"id":"VTX034-4","t":"OVID, METAMORPHOSES 1 - Theoi Classical Texts Library","u":"https://www.theoi.com/Text/OvidMetamorphoses1.html"}],"sum":"# Prometheus and the Clay: The Titan Who Made Humans and Gave Them Fire\n\nThe fire travelled inside a plant. Greek tradition said that this was how fire came to humanity: a gleam of it carried secretly in the hollow stalk of a fennel plant, out of the keeping of the gods, and handed to people who had been forbidden to have it. The thief was a Titan named Prometheus. In some of the oldest Greek versions of the story he had also done something larger first. He had made the people who would receive it.\n\n\"Prometheus moulded men out of water and earth,\" writes the mythographer known as Apollodorus, in the Library, a handbook of Greek myth compiled in the first or second century CE, \"and gave them also fire, which, unknown to Zeus, he had hidden in a stalk of fennel.\" When Zeus found out, \"he ordered Hephaestus to nail his body to Mount Caucasus.\" There Prometheus was kept bound for many years. \"Every day an eagle swooped on him and devoured the lobes of his liver, which grew by night.\"\n\n## Forethought\n\nPrometheus was one of the Titans, the older generation of gods overthrown by Zeus, a son of the Titan Iapetus. His name is usually understood to mean \"forethought,\" just as his brother Epimetheus means \"afterthought.\" He was the champion of humankind, and the father, in Greek imagination, of the human arts and sciences.\n\nThe oldest record of him is in Hesiod's Theogony, from around 700 BC, and there the story begins not with clay but with a dinner. At a place called Mecone, gods and mortals met to settle their dispute, and Prometheus divided a great ox. For humans he wrapped the meat and fat inside the ox's stomach. For Zeus he dressed up the white bones \"with cunning art and covered with shining fat.\" Zeus saw the trick, took the bones anyway, and from then on, Hesiod says, \"the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars.\" In anger Zeus withheld fire. Prometheus \"stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk.\"\n\nZeus's answer was a gift. He had the craftsman god Hephaestus shape a woman from earth and water, Pandora, \"all gifts,\" and sent her among men with a jar from which sorrow and disease escaped, leaving only Hope inside. Prometheus he chained, with the eagle at his liver, until in time the hero Heracles killed the bird and set him free.\n\n## The maker\n\nThe tradition that Prometheus also shaped the human body appears in later writers. The Roman poet Ovid, completing his Metamorphoses around 8 CE, tells the creation of the world from formless chaos, the sky set over the earth, the stars gleaming out, fish in the waves, animals on land, birds in the air. Something was still missing: \"a being capable of lofty thought, intelligent to rule.\"\n\nOvid offers two possibilities. Perhaps the unknown god made man \"of seed divine.\" Or perhaps Prometheus took \"the new soil of earth (that still contained some godly element of Heaven's Life),\" mixed it with \"water of new streams,\" and made the human race \"in image of commanding Gods.\" Either way, one thing marked the new creature out. \"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.\"\n\nIn the fifth century BC, the play Prometheus Bound, traditionally credited to the tragedian Aeschylus, widened the Titan's gifts still further. Beyond fire, Prometheus claims to have taught humanity writing, mathematics, agriculture and medicine, and to have saved the human race when Zeus wanted to wipe it out. He also holds a secret, learned from his mother, about a marriage that could produce a son to overthrow Zeus.\n\n## The mainstream reading\n\nScholars read the myth as an account of what makes humans human: made from the ground like everything else, yet given fire, skill and a face turned upward, at a price paid by their benefactor. The philologist Angelo Casanova sees in Prometheus an old trickster figure who explains the mixture of good and bad in human life, and notes that making humanity from clay was a motif from the East, familiar from Babylonian creation stories. Prometheus also resembles the Sumerian god Enki, a bringer of civilisation who protected humanity against the other gods, even through the great flood, and who made people from clay. The record marks the modern idea of a non-human creator as unresolved interpretation, with no measurable data, and the clay story as a late literary version of a widespread motif.\n\nFire-stealing tricksters appear in stories around the world. Mary Shelley called Frankenstein, in 1818, \"The Modern Prometheus,\" and the Titan has stood ever since for the scientist who makes life, or knowledge, and suffers for it.\n\n## The question no version answers\n\nWhat the sources share is not the method of creation. It is the cost. In every version, whoever gave humans fire, or skill, or the means to survive, was punished for it, by the very god who rules the sky. The punishment is out of all proportion: a body nailed to a mountain at the edge of the known world, torn every day and remade every night. Hesiod's reason is a dispute over sacrificial meat. Aeschylus's is the theft of fire and the teaching of the arts. The poets never quite explain why knowledge in human hands should provoke such fury, or what the gods expected people to do with an upright face turned toward the stars.\n\nPausanias, the Greek traveller who toured the sanctuaries of Greece in the second century CE, found a place where the story had been made physical. At Panopeus in Phocis, by the roadside, stood a small building of unburnt brick with a marble image that some said was Asclepius and others Prometheus. In a ravine nearby, he wrote, \"there lie two stones, each of which is big enough to fill a cart. They have the color of clay,\" and \"they smell very like the skin of a man.\"\n\nPicture those two clay-coloured boulders lying in the ravine at Panopeus, each the size of a cartload, still giving off the smell of human skin, which the people there said was all that was left over after the whole race of mankind had been made.","qs":["Prometheus gave humans fire against the gods' will and was chained for it. Why do so many myths punish whoever gives humans knowledge?","Pausanias was shown the actual clay, still smelling of skin. What did people gain from tying a creation myth to a place?","Ovid made the upright stance and the upward gaze the point of creation. What do you think he meant?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Prometheus_and_Atlas%2C_Laconian_black-figure_kylix%2C_by_the_Arkesilas_Painter%2C_560-550_BC%2C_inv._16592_-_Museo_Gregoriano_Etrusco_-_Vatican_Museums_-_DSC01069.jpg/1280px-Prometheus_and_Atlas%2C_Laconian_black-figure_kylix%2C_by_the_Arkesilas_Painter%2C_560-550_BC%2C_inv._16592_-_Museo_Gregoriano_Etrusco_-_Vatican_Museums_-_DSC01069.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prometheus_and_Atlas,_Laconian_black-figure_kylix,_by_the_Arkesilas_Painter,_560-550_BC,_inv._16592_-_Museo_Gregoriano_Etrusco_-_Vatican_Museums_-_DSC01069.jpg","title":"Prometheus and Atlas, Laconian black-figure kylix, by the Arkesilas Painter, 560-550 BC, inv. 16592 - Museo Gregoriano Etrusco - Vatican Museums - DSC01069.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Daderot","cap":"Exhibit in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco - Vatican Museums."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cd/Carl_Bloch%2C_Prometheus%27_Befrielse%2C_1864%2C_The_Hellenic_Ministry_of_Culture_and_Sports.jpg/1280px-Carl_Bloch%2C_Prometheus%27_Befrielse%2C_1864%2C_The_Hellenic_Ministry_of_Culture_and_Sports.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carl_Bloch,_Prometheus%27_Befrielse,_1864,_The_Hellenic_Ministry_of_Culture_and_Sports.jpg","title":"Carl Bloch, Prometheus' Befrielse, 1864, The Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Carl Bloch","cap":"","alt":"Carl Bloch, Prometheus' Befrielse, 1864, The Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/Creation_Prometheus_Louvre_Ma445.jpg/1280px-Creation_Prometheus_Louvre_Ma445.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Creation_Prometheus_Louvre_Ma445.jpg","title":"Creation Prometheus Louvre Ma445.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Unknown artistUnknown artist","cap":"The creation of man by Prometheus. Marble relief, Italy, 3rd century CE."},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Griepenkerl%2C_Beseelung_der_menschlichen_Tonfigur_durch_Athena.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Griepenkerl,_Beseelung_der_menschlichen_Tonfigur_durch_Athena.jpg","title":"Griepenkerl, Beseelung der menschlichen Tonfigur durch Athena.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Christian Griepenkerl","cap":"After Prometheus has created man out of mud, Athena breathes life into him, imparting reason and understanding. Part of a cycle on the myth of Prometheus by Chr"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Heinrich_fueger_1817_prometheus_brings_fire_to_mankindFXD.jpg/1280px-Heinrich_fueger_1817_prometheus_brings_fire_to_mankindFXD.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heinrich_fueger_1817_prometheus_brings_fire_to_mankindFXD.jpg","title":"Heinrich fueger 1817 prometheus brings fire to mankindFXD.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Heinrich Füger","cap":"","alt":"Heinrich fueger 1817 prometheus brings fire to mankind FXD"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"8 CE","h":"Apollodorus 1st-2nd c. CE; Ovid 8 CE","s":[309]},{"v":"medieval mss.","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[309]},{"v":"Greek/Latin","h":"Language","s":[309]}],"hs":{"309":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX034.webp","w":1280,"h":1022,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Prometheus_and_Atlas%2C_Laconian_black-figure_kylix%2C_by_the_Arkesilas_Painter%2C_560-550_BC%2C_inv._16592_-_Museo_Gregoriano_Etrusco_-_Vatican_Museums_-_DSC01069.jpg/1280px-Prometheus_and_Atlas%2C_Laconian_black-figure_kylix%2C_by_the_Arkesilas_Painter%2C_560-550_BC%2C_inv._16592_-_Museo_Gregoriano_Etrusco_-_Vatican_Museums_-_DSC01069.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}