Is Elon Musk the new Prometheus?

Prometheus is having another moment, from transhumanist theory to the technology dreams of American billionaires. Elon Musk’s admirers often apply the ancient label to him, and Musk himself titled a photograph of a SpaceX rocket launch "Prometheus Unleashed."

Jonas Grethlein, the German classicist known for his book "My Year with Achilles," turns to that renewed fascination in his new work. His earlier book connected personal questions about mortality with the ancient questions raised by Homer’s "Iliad." This time, he begins with society and asks what the Prometheus myth reveals about technology, progress and freedom.

Prometheus appears both as the defiant challenger of Zeus and as the bringer of fire, even as a maker of human beings. Those roles made him a cultural hero and a symbol of technical progress, creativity and liberty. Yet the myth also includes the bound Prometheus, chained to a rock by Zeus and visited each day by an eagle that eats his liver. Because he is immortal, the liver grows back and the punishment repeats.

That tension has allowed the myth to frame debates about humanity’s relationship with technology and scientific advancement, as well as the meaning of freedom. In the fifth-century tragedy "Prometheus Bound," fire becomes the origin of the arts and technical skills, known in ancient Greek as "technai," linking Prometheus not only with invention but with culture and civilization.

The figure remains visible in modern popular culture. Rick Riordan’s bestselling Percy Jackson novels combine Greek and Roman mythology with fantasy, while Paul Manship’s golden Prometheus has stood in the water at New York’s Rockefeller Center for nearly a century. The sculpture presents an image of confident faith in progress, and remains one of New York’s most photographed sights.

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Prometheus Unleashed