In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan god of fire.
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Prometheus is best known for defying the gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge, and more generally, civilization.
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Prometheus is known for his intelligence and for being a champion of humankind, and is generally seen as the author of the human arts and sciences.
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Prometheus is sometimes presented as the father of Deucalion, the hero of the flood story.
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Punishment of Prometheus as a consequence of the theft of fire and giving it to humans is a popular subject of both ancient and modern culture.
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Prometheus was bound to a rock, and an eagle—the emblem of Zeus—was sent to eat his liver.
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In yet more symbolism, the struggle of Prometheus is located by some at Mount Elbrus or at Mount Kazbek, two volcanic promontories in the Caucasus Mountains beyond which for the ancient Greeks lay the realm of the barbarii.
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Prometheus was a focus of religious activity mainly at Athens, where he was linked to Athena and Hephaestus, who were the Greek deities of creative skills and technology.
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The suggestion that Prometheus was in origin the human "inventor of the fire-sticks, from which fire is kindled" goes back to Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC.
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Oldest record of Prometheus is in Hesiod, but stories of theft of fire by a trickster figure are widespread around the world.
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In that account, Prometheus was a son of the Titan Iapetus by Clymene or Asia, one of the Oceanids.
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Prometheus placed two sacrificial offerings before the Olympian: a selection of beef hidden inside an ox's stomach, and the bull's bones wrapped completely in "glistening fat".
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Prometheus stole fire back from Zeus in a fennel stalk and restored it to humanity.
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Casanova, finds in Prometheus a reflection of an ancient, pre-Hesiodic trickster-figure, who served to account for the mixture of good and bad in human life, and whose fashioning of humanity from clay was an Eastern motif familiar in Enuma Elish.
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Prometheus Bound, perhaps the most famous treatment of the myth to be found among the Greek tragedies, is traditionally attributed to the 5th-century BC Greek tragedian Aeschylus.
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The playwright's dependence on the Hesiodic source material is clear, though Prometheus Bound includes a number of changes to the received tradition.
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Ancient artists depict Prometheus wearing the pointed cap of an artist or artisan, like Hephaistos, and the crafty hero Odysseus.
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Prometheus sometimes appears in depictions of Athena's birth from Zeus' forehead.
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Imagery of Prometheus and the creation of man used for the purposes of the representation of the creation of Adam in biblical symbolism is a recurrent theme in the artistic expression of late Roman antiquity.
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In Georgian mythology, Amirani is a cultural hero who challenged the chief god and, like Prometheus, was chained on the Caucasian mountains where birds would eat his organs.
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The symbolic import for comparative religion would maintain that suffering related to justified conduct is redeemed in both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament narratives, while in Prometheus there remains the image of a non-forgiving deity, Zeus, who nonetheless requires reverence.
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Shakespeare's symbolic reference to the "heat" associated with Prometheus' fire is to the association of the gift of fire to the mythological gift or theological gift of life to humans.
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Myth of Prometheus has been a favourite theme of Western art and literature in the post-renaissance and post-Enlightenment tradition and, occasionally, in works produced outside the West.
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Romantic era, Prometheus was the rebel who resisted all forms of institutional tyranny epitomised by Zeus – church, monarch, and patriarch.
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Prometheus is the lyrical "I" who speaks in Goethe's Sturm und Drang poem "Prometheus", addressing God in misotheist accusation and defiance.
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Prometheus was originally planned as a drama but never completed by Goethe, though the poem is inspired by it.
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Prometheus is the creative and rebellious spirit rejected by God and who angrily defies him and asserts himself.
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Goethe's Prometheus is significant for the contrast it evokes with the biblical text of Corinthians rather than for its similarities.
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Prometheus's version was written in response to the version of myth as presented by Aeschylus and is orientated to the high British Idealism and high British Romanticism prevailing in Shelley's own time.
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The Greek origins of the Prometheus myth have already discussed the Titanomachia as placing the cosmic struggle of Olympus at some point in time preceding the creation of humanity, while in the New Testament synthesis there was a strong assimilation of the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew prophets and their strongly eschatological orientation.
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Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, written by Mary Shelley when she was 18, was published in 1818, two years before Percy Shelley's above-mentioned play.
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Franz Kafka wrote a short piece titled "Prometheus, " outlining what he saw as his perspective on four aspects of this myth:.
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Eulenspiegel Society began the magazine Prometheus in the early 1970s; it is a decades-long-running magazine exploring issues important to kinksters, ranging from art and erotica, to advice columns and personal ads, to conversation about the philosophy of consensual kink.
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Works of classical music, opera, and ballet directly or indirectly inspired by the myth of Prometheus have included renderings by some of the major composers of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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