Epimetheus and Prometheus form one of the clearest cases in Greek myth of what scholars of naming call a speaking name, or nomen loquens, deployed as a deliberate pair: both names build on the same root, metis, thought or cunning intelligence, attached to opposite prefixes, pro, before, and epi, after, so the myth quite literally personifies foresight and hindsight as brothers and sets their contrasting natures to work against each other in a single connected story, forethought correcting, at real cost, what afterthought has already ruined. Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days give the earlier, sparser version of their story, but the philosopher Plato, writing his dialogue Protagoras in the fourth century BCE, supplies by far the fullest ancient account of the specific episode in which the brothers are tasked with distributing survival qualities among the newly created mortal and animal creatures, using the myth as a philosophical set piece to open a debate about whether civic virtue can be taught, a use of the old story considerably more sophisticated than anything in Hesiod's brief genealogical treatment.
Because Plato's version is both fuller and considerably later than Hesiod's, classicists read the detailed picture of Epimetheus lavishing gifts on the animals and leaving nothing for humanity as substantially Plato's own philosophical elaboration built on a much sparser inherited outline, rather than a scene Hesiod himself described in comparable detail, a reminder that a myth's most vivid, most often retold version is not always its oldest or most original one.