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The Muses
Prometheus is a trickster god who quickly gets into trouble with Zeus. He tricks Zeus into selecting a smaller portion of meat after a sacrifice, arousing his anger. He also steals fire from Zeus and gifts it to human beings. As a result, Zeus punishes him by chaining him up on a mountain, with an eagle that comes to eat his liver every day. Heracles eventually frees Prometheus from his punishment, albeit with Zeus’ permission.
Prometheus Quotes in Theogony
The Theogony quotes below are all either spoken by Prometheus or refer to Prometheus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Theogony Quotes
For from her is descended the female sex, a great affliction to mortals as they dwell with their husbands—no fit partners for accursed Poverty, but only for Plenty. As the bees in their sheltered nests feed the drones, those conspirators in badness, and while they busy themselves all day and every day till sundown making the white honeycomb, the drones stay inside in the sheltered cells and pile the toil of others into their own bellies, even so as a bane for mortal men has high-thundering Zeus created women, conspirators in causing difficulty.
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This passage describes Zeus’ punishment to humankind for accepting Prometheus’ gift of fire: Pandora and her box of evils, from whom, Hesiod claims, the entire “female sex” is descended, who are “a great affliction to mortals.” Here, the casual misogyny found in the poems discussion of rape and sexual violence rears up again in the form of derogatory descriptions of women. While Pandora technically is a curse against the entire human race, Hesiod takes great pains to emphasize that she is a woman. He goes on to compare women to drone bees (which, ironically, are male bees), who stay “inside Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi atque placeat. Molestiae
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Prometheus Character Timeline in Theogony
The timeline below shows where the character Prometheus appears in Theogony. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Theogony
The poem then details a conflict between Prometheus and Zeus. During a ritual sacrifice, Prometheus tricks Zeus into taking a lesser portion of...
(full context)
...hero who partakes in many adventures, including slaying the monster Medusa and freeing the god Prometheus. Hesiod thus completes the historical genealogy from the first moments of existence up until the...
(full context)
