A Titan With No Altar

Unlike his brother Prometheus, who received real cult honors in classical Athens, most notably a torch race called the Promethia run from an altar he shared with Hephaestus in the grove of the Academy, Epimetheus is not attested as an object of worship anywhere in the ancient Greek world; no altar, festival or priesthood dedicated to him survives in either the literary or the archaeological record. Whatever standing he carries in the wider mythological tradition rests on his role in the sequence of creation itself, the Titan tasked with handing out qualities, speed, strength, fur, wings and the rest, to every newly made living thing before Prometheus stepped in on humanity's behalf, rather than on any devotional practice addressed to him directly. What the myth preserved instead of a cult was a moral figure: a byword in later Greek and Roman writers for thoughtless, unreflective action taken without weighing its consequences in advance, set permanently against his brother's name as a byword for foresight. The pairing was proverbial enough that ancient writers could invoke either name alone, forethought or afterthought, and expect an audience to understand the contrast being drawn without needing to retell the myth of Pandora at all.