The Punishment Of Prometheus In Hesiod's Theogony

From the point of view of humanity, Zeus’s punishment of Prometheus is unjustified and comes from a desire to exert control rather than justice. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Prometheus is portrayed is a deceiver who likes to test Zeus with no apparent care for humankind. Prometheus is characterized as “devious” (Theogony lines 511 and 521), his actions are described using verb forms of “deceive” (lines 537 and 565), and his deed of giving Zeus the bad parts of the meal are labeled as a “trick” (lines 547, 550, 551, 560, and 562). Hesiod briefly mentions that Prometheus gave the good parts of the meal to the humans, but only as a supplement to the main point, which is that Prometheus wanted to sneakily give Zeus the bad parts of the meal. However, if the whole point was to trick Zeus into eating the bad parts of the meal, Prometheus could have given to best parts of the meal to any other god at the feast—or even himself—rather than to humans.

Transitioning to Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, in which Prometheus is called a “universal benefactor of mankind” by Io (Aeschylus 21) and a “lover of mankind” (2). While in Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus acknowledges that Prometheus “stole and gave to mortals; a grave crime” (2), Prometheus’s actions are also framed as crimes that he committed for the good of humanity. For example, Prometheus views as a “gift” and “blessing” his decision to steal fire for mankind (10). Moreover, not only does he steal fire from Zeus to give to humans, which would have been sufficient to spite the king of the gods, Prometheus also taught them how to master fire as well as many other arts and inventions like using the wheel, riding horses, travelling via ships, concocting medicines, and interpreting prophecies