What is the legend of fire？

The Legend of Fire ...

At the very beginning, human beings understood only how to use fire for warmth and for keeping wild animals at bay. One day, an injured bird fell into a fire. People pulled the charred bird out of the flames and started nibbling on it, finding it much more delectable than eating raw bird! Once word of this discovery had spread, people began to change from eating their food raw to eating it cooked. As a result, fire became an indispensable part of man's life, and flame cooking marked the beginning of culinary art.

Greek mythology, 'Prometheus'

Prometheus steal fire from Zeus

Zeus in his wrath denied men the secret of fire. Prometheus felt sorry for his creations, and watched as they shivered in the cold and winter's nights. He decided to give his most loved creation a great gift that was a "good servant and bad master". He took fire from the hearth of the gods by stealth and brought it to men in a hollow wand of fennel, or ferule that served him instead of a staff. Thus mankind was warm. To punish Prometheus for this hubris (and all of mankind in the process), Zeus devised "such evil for them that they shall desire death rather than life, and Prometheus shall see their misery and be powerless to succor them. That shall be his keenest pang among the torments I will heap upon him." Zeus could not just take fire back, because a god or goddess could not take away what the other had given.

Zeus was enraged because the giving of fire began an era of enlightenment for Man, and had Prometheus carried to Mount Caucasus, where an eagle by the name of Ethon (offspring of the monsters Typhon and Echidna) would pick at his liver; it would grow back each day and the eagle would eat it again. In some stories, Zeus has Prometheus tortured on the mountain because he knows the name of the person who, according to prophecy, will overthrow the king of the gods. This punishment was to last 30,000 years. About 12 generations later, Heracles (known as Hercules in Roman mythology), passing by on his way to find the apples of the Hesperides as part of the Twelve Labours, freed Prometheus, in a bargain he had agreed with Zeus in exchange for Chiron's immortality, by shooting the eagle with an arrow. Zeus did not mind this time that Prometheus had again evaded his punishment, as the act brought more glory to Heracles, who was Zeus's son. Prometheus was invited to return to Olympus, though he still had to carry with him the rock to which he was chained.


To punish man for the offenses of Prometheus, Zeus told Hephaestus (Vulcan) to "mingle together all things loveliest, sweetest, and best, but look that you also mingle therewith the opposites of each." So Hephaestus took gold and dross, wax and flint, pure snow and mud of the highways, honey and gall; he took the bloom of the rose and the toad's venom, the voice of laughing water and the peacocks squall; he took the seas beauty and its treachery, the dog's fidelity and the wind's inconstancy, and the mother bird's heart of love and the cruelty of the tiger. All these, and other contraries past number, he blended cunningly into one substance and this he molded into the shape that Zeus had described to him. She was as beautiful as a goddess and Zeus named her Pandora which meant "all gifted".