Clay Creations
The muddy beginnings of the mortals
Content warnings: animal sacrifice, bodily harm
During the Titan war, Prometheus and Epimetheus turned against their brothers, Atlas and Menoetius as well as the rest of their Titan family to fight alongside the Olympians, becoming key allies and advisors to Zeus.
After the tumultuous Titan war, Zeus rewarded the brothers for their loyalty and offered them a place on Olympus, but they decided that they would rather live amongst the nature on Earth and visit their friends on Olympus at their leisure. Zeus laughed and clapped them on the back, leaving them to build their homes as they pleased.
Visiting them on Earth some time later, Zeus came with a plan to populate the Earth with other living beings. He asked the brothers to create them and bestow amongst them the gifts, traits and talents of the gods. Epimetheus, inspired, began creating all kinds of animals that could run wild over the Earth. He gave them gifts as Zeus had asked, granting birds flight, fish the ability to breathe underwater and cats large and small claws to fight, hunt and defend, to name just a few.
Meanwhile, Prometheus was working a little slower and a little more carefully. He had begun sculpting with clay from a nearby river, crafting faces, torsos, arms and legs. Once he was finished with his small group of newly-carved humans, as he named them, he called for Athena to come and see his master work.
Athena, goddess of wisdom and strategic war, had become friends with Prometheus and they had come to share ideas often, so showing her his latest creations was a natural next step to Prometheus. When Athena saw his men she loved them and breathed life into them from her own lungs.
With the brothers’ creations now given life, Prometheus asked Epimetheus what godly gifts remained for him to give mankind. Epimetheus went to check what was left but he had already used them all on the animals now roaming the Earth. Zeus loved the new creatures, especially Prometheus’ humans, all of whom were male. When Prometheus pointed out that they had no gifts, Zeus just laughed, saying that they had the same form as the gods, a gift enough, but mankind would be completely subservient to them; weak and dependant.
This attitude rankled with Prometheus; he wanted his creations to have as much chance to live on their own as they could, not to remain crippled and dependant on the gods through sheer hubris and cruelty. With the beginnings of a plan building, Prometheus suggested that he teach mankind the proper way to prepare sacrifices and worship the gods, then Zeus could come and pick the parts of the ox that he would prefer humanity to offer up to him. Zeus readily agreed, pleased, and left Prometheus to teach his worship to his creations.
Prometheus seized his opportunity, teaching his men that the gods always wanted the first and best of everything. He showed them how to separate out the nutritious, good parts of the ox from the bad, useless parts, placing them into two piles. He then covered the useless meat parts with a layer of the most indulgent, fatty meat and covered the good meat pile with the bones and gristle. Making sure his new students were watching and taking his tricks onboard, Prometheus then called for Zeus to come and select which pile he thought was the better token.
Zeus descended from Olympus and examined the two piles, wrinkling his nose in disgust at the one covered in useless, disgusting bones and offal. He picked the other pile, the one covered in a layer of good meat, and headed back to Mount Olympus, ready to show the other gods how well mankind would worship them. In front of his hall of gods, he began to display the meat given by the humans, but it didn’t take long before Prometheus’ trick became apparent and Zeus was humiliated before his pantheon.
Zeus stormed from his palace and back down to Prometheus, where the humans were joyously celebrating the success of his ruse. Zeus berated them for fooling him, for making him look inept. To punish them, he decreed that man would never be allowed to use fire so they could never again forget the importance of the gods.
Prometheus followed after Zeus, begging him to reconsider; without fire, the humans would be weak. Zeus threw him off, dismissing his concerns. He told Prometheus that humanity would now always be dependent on the gods, weak and unimportant — where they belonged.
Prometheus was upset and angry on behalf of his new creations, unwilling to let them stay as meagre stooges with worth only as worship to the gods. He decided to defy Zeus and, once night fell, began climbing Mount Olympus, heading towards Hephaestus’ forge. Reaching the workshop, still warm from the fires kept stoked all day, Prometheus crept between the giant, sleeping forms of the Cyclopes and up to one of those very fires, taking out a hollowed fennel stalk he’d brought with him.
Prometheus reached into the dying fire and caught a spark from it within the fennel, sealing it back up for his journey back down the mountain. Stealing back out of the forge, he made his way swiftly back to the human settlement that had been built around his home.
The next morning, Prometheus gathered his small group of humans and gave them the spark from the forge. He showed them how to use it to make fire and taught them how to keep the fire alight, to tend to it like the beast it was. It wasn’t until that night that Zeus looked down upon the Earth and saw the settlement, each home lit by the fires of the gods.
Zeus roared in anger, summoning Prometheus to his palace immediately. In front of his previously loyal friend, Zeus raged about Prometheus’ betrayal of both his wishes and his orders. The gods would no longer have complete power over mankind, all due to Prometheus’ treason; he would have to be punished, severely.
Zeus had Prometheus kept captive while he commissioned Hephaestus to forge unbreakable chains. With these, Zeus had Prometheus hung by them on a sheer cliff face deep in the Caucasus mountain range. Every day, an eagle would fly down to Prometheus and tear out his liver; his Titan healing would heal him overnight, only to begin the whole process again the next day. Zeus looked him straight in the eye, ignoring his friend’s cries of pain, and sentenced him to an eternity of this torture.
Prometheus never seemed to regret his decision to help mankind the way he did. Some hundreds of years after he was chained to the cliff, Prometheus’ freedom was finally bargained for by the centaur Chiron as part of a bigger story than his own.
