Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

For the theft of fire and the Mecone deception, Zeus had Prometheus bound on a Caucasian crag (or pillar) with unbreakable bonds, and sent an eagle—child of Typhon and Echidna in Apollodorus—to feast by day on the Titan’s liver, which grew again by night. Hesiod leaves him there in torment; tragedy and the handbooks add the destined release. When Heracles, roaming toward the apples of the Hesperides, came to the Caucasus, he shot the eagle with his bow and loosed Prometheus’s bonds. Zeus permitted the liberation on terms: an immortal must consent to die in the Titan’s stead. Chiron, already writhing from Heracles’ Hydra-poisoned arrow and unable to heal though immortal, accepted death; his immortality passed so that Prometheus might go free (or so that the balance of Zeus’s decree might stand). Apollodorus adds that Heracles took for himself an olive wreath—or olive bond—as the token of the substitute suffering. Prometheus, freed, became counselor again: he warned Heracles not to pluck the apples himself but to send Atlas and to use the pad-trick when Atlas tried to leave the sky on the hero’s shoulders. The liberation thus sits between labor and labor—an act of olympian reconciliation through Heracles’ archery and Chiron’s gift of death—closing the fire-thief’s punishment that began at Mecone.