Prometheus stared at his friend in astonishment. ‘But … but why ever not?’
‘With fire they could rise up to challenge us. With fire they could think themselves our equals. I feel it and know it. They must never be given fire. I have spoken.’
A long peal of thunder in the distance affirmed his words.
‘But,’ Zeus smiled now, ‘everything else in the world is theirs to enjoy. They may travel to every corner. They can sail Poseidon’s oceans, seek Demeter’s help in sowing seeds and growing food, learn from Hestia the arts of keeping a home, discover how to keep animals for their milk, fur and labour, and they can learn the arts of hunting from Artemis. Hermes can teach them guile, Apollo can instruct them in the arts of music and knowledge. Athena will teach them how to be wise and contented. And Aphrodite will share with them the arts of love. They will be free and happy.’
‘What shall we call them?’ Athena asked.
‘ “That which is below”,’ said Zeus after some thought. ‘Anthropos.’fn3
He clapped his hands and the huddle of hand-crafted humans became a hundred and the hundred became a horde and the horde, spreading ever outwards, became a multitude, until the human population, numbering now in the hundreds of thousands, was on its way to finding a home in every corner of the world.
And so the early race of man came to be. Gaia, Zeus, Apollo and Athena might be said to be its progenitors as much as Prometheus, who fashioned humanity from the four elements: Earth (Gaia’s clay), Water (the spittle of Zeus), Fire (the sun of Apollo) and Air (the breath of Athena). They lived and thrived, exemplifying the best of their creators. But something was missing. Something very important.
The Golden Age
Alma Mater, the bountiful Mother Earth, made fertile and fruitful by Demeter, was a sweet paradise for the first men. They knew no disease, poverty, famine or war. Life was an idyll of innocence and light pastoral duties. It was a time of happy worship of, and familiarity and even friendship with, the deities who moved amongst them in easy, unfrightening shapes and dimensions. It gave Zeus and the other gods, Titans and immortals great pleasure to mingle with the charming, childlike homunculi that Prometheus has shaped from clay.
Perhaps we only imagined these first days of beautiful simplicity and universal kindness so that we could have a high point of paradisal sublimity against which to judge the low, degraded times that came after. The later Greeks certainly believed that the Golden Age had truly existed. It was ever present in their thinking and poetry and gave them a dream of perfection to aspire to, a vision more concrete and realized than our own vague ideas of early man grunting in caves. Platonic ideals and perfect forms were perhaps the intellectual expression of that wistful race memory.
It was natural that, of all the immortals, the one who loved humankind best should be their artist-creator Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus now spent more time living with man than they spent on Olympus in the company of their fellow immortals.
It saddened Prometheus that he had only been allowed to create male people, for he felt that this cloned single-sex race lacked variety both in its outlook, disposition and character and in its inability to breed and create new types. His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged and unchallenging existence had no zest to it. To approach the godlike status that his creation deserved, mankind needed something more. They needed fire. Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion and forge; and they needed an inner creative fire too, a divine fire, to enable them to think, imagine, dare and do.
The more he watched over and mingled with his creation, the more Prometheus became convinced that fire was exactly what they needed. And he knew where to find it.
The Fennel Stalk
Prometheus surveyed the twin crowns of Olympus towering above him. The tallest peak, Mytikos, reached nearly ten thousand podes high into the clouds. Next to it, two or three hundred or so feet lower but much harder to climb, reared the rocky face of Stefani. To the west loomed the heights of Skolio. Prometheus knew that the dying rays of the evening sun would shield that climb – the toughest of all – from the gods enthroned above, and so he began the perilous ascent confident that he could reach the summit unseen.
Prometheus had never disobeyed Zeus before. Not in anything big. In games and races and wrestling matches and competitions to win the hearts of nymphs he had freely teased and taunted his friend, but he had never defied him outright. The hierarchy of the pantheon was not something any being could disrupt without real consequences. Zeus was a beloved friend, but he was, above all, Zeus.
Yet Prometheus was determined on his course of action. Much as he had always loved Zeus, he found that he loved mankind more. The excitement and resolution he felt were stronger than any fear of divine wrath. He hated to cross his friend, but when it came to a choice, there was no choice.
By the time he had scaled Skolio’s sheer wall, the western gates had closed upon Apollo’s chariot of the sun and the whole mountain was shrouded in darkness. Crouching low, Prometheus made his way around the jagged outcrop that crested the bowl-like amphitheatre of Megala Kazania. Looking ahead he could see the Plateau of the Muses beyond, flickering with dancing licks of light thrown by the fires of Hephaestus’s forge several hundred podes or so further off.
Around the other side of Olympus the gods were supping. Prometheus could hear Apollo’s lyre, Hermes’ fluting syrinx, the raucous laugh of Ares and the snarling of Artemis’s hounds. Hugging the outer walls of the forge the Titan edged along to its forecourt. He was startled, as he rounded the corner, to see stretched out naked on the ground the huge figure of Brontes snoring by the fire. Prometheus hung back in the shadows. He knew that the Cyclopes assisted Hephaestus, but that they might sleep on the premises was more than he had bargained for.
At the very mouth of the forge he saw a narthex plant, sometimes called the laserwort or giant fennel (Ferula communis) – not quite the same bulbous vegetable we use today to impart a pleasant aniseedy flavour to fish, but a near enough relation. Prometheus leaned forward and picked a long, vigorous specimen. Tightly packed within there was a thick, lint-like pith. Stripping the stem of its outer leaves Prometheus stretched out and pushed the stalk across the forecourt, over Brontes’ slumbering, mumbling form and towards the fire. The heat emanating from the furnace was enough to cause the end of the stalk to catch at once. Prometheus pulled it back in with as much care as he could, but he could not prevent a spark from falling from its sputtering end straight down onto Brontes’ torso. The skin on the Cyclops’s chest sizzled and hissed and he awoke with a roar of pain. As Brontes looked groggily down at his chest, trying to understand where this pain was coming from and what it could mean, Prometheus hauled in the stalk and fled.
The Gift of Fire
Prometheus clambered back down Olympus, the fennel stalk clenched between his teeth, its pith burning slowly. Every five minutes or so he would take it from his mouth and blow gently, nursing its glow. When he at last reached the safety of the valley floor he made his way to the human settlement where he and his brother had made their home.
You may say that Prometheus could surely have had the wit to teach man to strike stones together, or rub sticks, but we have to remember that what Prometheus stole was fire from heaven, divine fire. Perhaps he took the inner spark that ignited in man the curiosity to rub sticks and strike flints in the first place.