Menoetius's instant destruction reads differently once set deliberately beside the fates of his three brothers, and several modern commentators on Hesiod's Theogony treat the four sons of Iapetus as a structured set rather than a loose list. Menoetius, struck down at once for raw, reckless insolence, represents force without any cleverness at all, punished before he can even act further. Prometheus, by contrast, is punished only after a sustained campaign of deception against Zeus, the theft of fire following earlier tricks over the division of sacrificial meat, so his suffering is drawn out and his defiance treated with a measure of grudging narrative respect Hesiod never extends to Menoetius. Epimetheus fails through neither violence nor cunning but through simple thoughtlessness, accepting Pandora despite an explicit warning, so disaster arrives slowly and passively rather than being struck down instantly from outside. Atlas, finally, is condemned not for a discrete act of defiance but for leading the Titans generally in their war, and his punishment is endless labor rather than death or imprisonment.
Read this way, the four brothers form something like a typology of ways to fail against a new cosmic order, instant violent overreach, sustained clever defiance, careless passivity, and generalized rebellion, each answered with a different kind of divine punishment. Whether Hesiod himself intended this precise structure or whether it is a pattern later readers have imposed on four originally more loosely connected figures is not something the text settles explicitly, but the four fates sit together closely enough in the Theogony's own sequence that the contrast is difficult to read as accidental.