feats, their introduction of fire, for example, and of various arts. In the same way it will be well, in reviewing Greek legends, to keep Prometheus' share in the making of men apart from the other stories of his exploits as a benefactor of the men whom he made. In Hesiod, Prometheus is the son of the Titan Iapetus, and perhaps his chief exploit is to play upon Zeus a trick of which we find the parallel in various savage myths. It seems, however, from Ovid,[1] and other texts, that Hesiod somewhere spoke of Prometheus as having made men out of clay, like Pund-jel in the Australian, Qat in the Melanesian, and Tiki in the Maori myths. The same story is preserved in Servius's commentary on Virgil.[2] A different legend is preserved in the Etymologicum Magnum (voc. Ikonion). According to this story, after the deluge of Deucalion, "Zeus bade Prometheus and Athene make images of men out of clay, and the winds blew into them the breath of life." In confirmation of this legend, Pausanias was shown in Phocis certain stones of the colour of clay, and "smelling very like human flesh;" and these, according to the Phocians, were "the remains of the clay from which the whole human race was fashioned by Prometheus."[3]
Aristophanes, too, in the Birds (686) talks of men as πλάσματα πήλου, figures kneaded of clay. Thus there are sufficient traces in Greek tradition of the savage myth that man was made of clay by some superior being, like Pund-jel in the quaint Australian story.
- ↑ Ovid. Metam., i. 82.
- ↑ Eclogue, vi. 42.
- ↑ Pausanias, x. 4, 3.
