Prometheus, whose name means *forethought*, was one of the second-generation Titans — born of Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene, brother to Atlas, Epimetheus and Menoetius. When Zeus and the Olympians overthrew the older gods, Prometheus had the rare wisdom to read which way the wind was blowing, and he fought on the winning side. Zeus rewarded him with a quiet, comfortable position on Olympus. He then proceeded to throw it all away for the sake of human beings.
The clearest version of the story comes from the Greek poet Hesiod in his *Theogony* and *Works and Days*. The gods and mortals were in dispute over which portion of a sacrificed ox belonged to whom. Prometheus, refereeing, hid the meat and good organs inside the ox's unappetising stomach, and hid the bones inside a layer of glistening fat. He invited Zeus to choose first. Zeus, knowingly or not, chose the fat. From that day on, the smoke of bones and fat was what humans burned for the gods — and humans got to eat the meat.
Zeus was furious. As punishment, he took fire away from mortals. Without fire, humanity was reduced to eating raw food, freezing in winter, defenceless in the dark. Prometheus could not bear it. He climbed Olympus, stole an ember from the sun (some versions say from Hephaestus's forge), hid it in the hollow stalk of a giant fennel, and brought it back down to humanity. He also, according to Aeschylus's *Prometheus Bound*, taught us writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, navigation, metallurgy and the reading of omens. He gave us, in other words, civilisation.
Zeus's response was Old-Testament-grade. He had Prometheus chained to a jagged crag in the Caucasus mountains at the eastern edge of the world. Every day, an eagle — the bird sacred to Zeus — flew up and tore out and ate his liver. Every night, because he was immortal, the liver grew back. Every dawn, the eagle returned. The torture was meant to last forever.
He was eventually freed, after many ages, by the hero Heracles, who shot the eagle with an arrow as part of his own labours. But the image that remained — the chained benefactor, the daily wound for the gift of knowledge — became one of the most quoted myths in the Western tradition. Mary Shelley subtitled *Frankenstein* "The Modern Prometheus." Romantic poets adored him. Every story about a scientist who steals a forbidden secret and is punished for it is, in some way, his.
Wear Prometheus and you wear the patron saint of the inconvenient gift — the reminder that almost everything good in human life was, at some point, stolen from somebody who did not want us to have it.