From Punished Trickster to Civilizing Rebel

The earliest surviving portraits of Prometheus, in Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, present him mainly as a trickster who angers Zeus by cheating him over a sacrificial division and by stealing fire, and who is punished for it, with little interest in fire as a gift to humanity for its own sake. The heroic reading familiar today, Prometheus as humanity's deliberate benefactor and a rebel who defies an unjust tyrant to give people knowledge and technology, comes into focus centuries later in Prometheus Bound, traditionally credited to Aeschylus.

Modern stylistic and metrical analysis has raised real doubts about that attribution, and a number of scholars now consider the play the work of a later, unknown playwright working in the Aeschylean manner rather than Aeschylus himself. Whoever wrote it, that version, not Hesiod's, is the one that shaped later reception: it is the source of Prometheus as a heroic rebel against arbitrary divine power, an image Romantic writers seized on directly, and which Mary Shelley invoked by subtitling Frankenstein "The Modern Prometheus." The figure most people know is therefore largely a later reinterpretation layered onto an older and considerably less flattering story about a clever god who was punished for outwitting a more powerful one.