There are many different stories told as to how men themselves came into being. Some say that they appeared lying on the ground under the ash trees and so were, in some sense, the children of the nymphs who are the guardian spirits of those trees. According to others they were formed inside the earth by the gods out of earth and fire and all the elements that can be mixed with them. It is said too that they were actually created by Prometheus himself. However this may be, it is agreed that in the beginning man was a weak, ignorant and defenceless creature.
But Prometheus, for some reason of his own, loved this weak and pitiful race. He saw them living like animals in caves, adapting themselves as best they could to each day that came, and he it was who taught them how to distinguish the seasons, one from another, how to follow the risings and the settings of the stars, the beginning of civilisation. He taught them how to use numbers and how to form letters to serve as signs for the sounds they made in speech and so finally to becorne the means by which knowledge could be recorded and the beauty and strength of thought and feeling be made to last for ever. He told them the way to tame wild animals, cattle and horses and dogs, so that they might relieve man's burden and help him in his work. He showed the sailors how to build boats that could float upon the waters and be carried forward on wings of sails. He taught them the meaning of the behaviour of birds and of their flight, so that by observing them they might know the future. In a word, it was Prometheus who gave men every art and every science; and finally he gave them the gift of fire. According to one story Prometheus stole the fire from the island of Lemnos where stood the forge and workshop of Hephaestus, the master craftsman among the gods; according to other stories he took the fire from the very hearth of Zeus himself on Olympus and brought it to man concealed in the hollow stem of a plant.
Now Zeus was a jealous god. He grudged men all the gifts that Prometheus had given them and he was angry with Prometheus for granting to these wretched creatures of an hour the ability to shape their lives into something better and to raise their thoughts up to the heaven itself. And so when he found that Prometheus had given to man this final gift of fire, he burst out into uncontrollable rage. He ordered his two invincible servants, Power and Violence, to seize Prometheus and to carry him to the highest peak of the dreadful Caucasus. There among the crawling glaciers, beneath the lashing hail and winds of storm, or, in the summer time, shelterless against the scorching heat of the sun, Prometheus was to be bound fast with unbreakable chains. The task of making these massive chains and of fastening them upon the victim's body was given to Hephaestus, and, though Hephaestus shrank from the dreadful deed of so torturing a brother god, he feared the power of Zeus and did not dare to disobey. Indeed he hated the skill of his hand, but he was forced to use it, and so he flung the hard chains around the immortal body of Prometheus and, with great blows of his hammer, nailed and fastened him to the towering rocks. He groaned as he did this work, for he pitied the good Titan; but the servants of Zeus, Power and Violence, merely mocked him for his weak spirit and hurled their insults at Prometheus bimself. "You did good to men," they said, "against the will of Zeus. Now see if there is any help to be found in men." And they taunted him with his name, which means "Forethought." "You will need more forethought than you have," they said, "if you are ever to break out again into freedom from these eternal chains."
But neither to them nor to Hephaestus did Prometheus speak a word, and so they left him nailed against the mountain side, a god tortured at the hands of gods. And as for Prometheus, though his body was chained to the rocks, his mind remained stubborn and unconquered. Zeus had the power to control his body in unbreakable fetters, but not Zeus himself could alter or subdue his fixed and steady mind and persuade him that there was anything in this punishment but black ingratitude and base injustice. Zeus owed the very power he wielded to the help given him by Prometheus; nor had Prometheus ever rebelled against the power of Zeus; his only crime had been to help mortal men to escape from savagery and to raise themselves, by knowledge, higher than the beasts.
Now there were many of the gods who pitied Prometheus and among these was the Titan, Father Oceanus, who surrounds the world with his life-giving stream. He left the self-made caves of rock in which he lived and came up to earth to give Prometheus the best advice he could, urging him to make his submission to Zeus. "For Zeus," he said, "has absolute power, and it is useless to fight against it. Whether you are right or wrong, it will make no difference. Surely it is better to relax your anger and to speak humbly to one who is more powerful than you are. And, if only you will do this, I myself will go to Zeus and will beg him to forgive you and the other gods will join me in their prayers."
But Prometheus would have none of this intervention, which seemed to him both disgraceful and useless. Zeus, he considered, was behaving like some dictator, whose lust for power was forcing him beyond the limits. Zeus had already destroyed many of the older gods and for these now Prometheus began to feel pity. There was his own brother, Atlas, who, by the will of Zeus, stood in the regions of the west and carried on his vast shoulders the whole weight of the heavens, a difficult burden which he could never shake off. And there was the great hundred-headed monster Typhon, the child of Heaven and Earth, who had been blasted to ruin by the thunderbolt of Zeus and now lay, a useless frame, beneath the roots of Etna, though still his anger boiled and the hot heaving of his breath would, from time to time, force fire and molten rock into the air and devastate all the fields of smiling Sicily. And so Prometheus told Oceanus to beware lest, if he took the side of one of the older gods, some such a fate as this might fall upon him too. As for himself, he said, no power and no pain would ever make him bow the knee to the tyrant of the gods. For century after century Zeus might hurl fresh pain upon him but would never conquer his unyielding spirit. Nor was Zeus himself secure for ever in his power. For, just as Ouranos had given way to Cronos and Cronos himself had been overmastered by Zeus, so, said Prometheus, there was a moment fixed in the hidden and distant future when Zeus, if he made a certain marriage, would become the father of a son mightier than himself, one who would laugh at lightning and thunderbolts, since he would possess a weapon far greater than these, and who with a motion of the hand would brush aside the great trident of Poseidon, the earth-shaker. Prometheus, who was wise with the wisdom of his mother Earth, knew the secret of this wedding and who it was, if ever she became the bride of Zeus, that was destined to bear a child more powerful than the present supreme ruler of gods and men. But, said Prometheus, he would never reveal this secret--never, until he was released from these chains and restored to the honours he had before. Nor could any exercise of supreme power make him in any manner of way alter his mind.
Leeming 1981:139-142 Taken from Rex Warner, The Stories of the Greeks, pp. 316-321.