Afterthought to His Brother's Forethought

Epimetheus appears in Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days as a second generation Titan, son of Iapetus and brother to Prometheus, Atlas and Menoetius, his very name meaning afterthought or hindsight in deliberate contrast to Prometheus, whose name means forethought. The contrast is the whole point of the myth. When Zeus ordered that every living creature be given a set of natural gifts, speed, strength, fur, wings and the rest, Epimetheus took charge of the distribution and gave them all away before he reached humankind, leaving Prometheus to compensate by stealing fire from the gods on humanity's behalf, an act that brought down Zeus's lasting anger. Prometheus is said in the surviving accounts to have specifically warned his brother never to accept a gift from Zeus, advice Epimetheus promptly ignored when Zeus sent Pandora, the first woman, formed as a punishment for Prometheus's theft and carrying the jar that, once opened, released all the world's evils and left only hope trapped inside. Hesiod's text is explicit that Epimetheus's acceptance of Pandora, made without the reflection his brother's name implies and his own name denies, is what let those evils loose upon the world.