ABSTRACT
Prometheus in Greek means 'the fore-thinker', a man with 'foresight'. The name derives from the Indo-European root 'man', extended to 'man-dh', a semanteme containing the idea of thought, wisdom, and reflection. In this respect, Prometheus is opposed to his brother Epimetheus, the clumsy character who does not think until after the event. The two brothers are so antithetical that Karl Kèrènyi named Epimetheus 'Prometheus' left hand'. They are so closely linked in the first accounts of the myth that Kèrènyi assumed that originally there was a unique hybrid being, Epimetheus-Prometheus, a creature similar to Plato's androgyne which supposedly engendered mankind. Plato, in his Protagoras, revived the complementary brothers, relating how Epimetheus was assigned to endow living things with assets for survival, forgetting to keep anything for mankind, thus forcing Prometheus to steal fire from Hephaestus and wisdom from Athena to give it to them.
