Epimetheus

Epimetheus is a second-generation Titan, son of Iapetus and brother of Prometheus, Atlas and Menoetius. His name means afterthought or hindsight, in deliberate contrast to his brother Prometheus, whose name means forethought, and the two act throughout as a matched pair of foresight and its lack. In one strand of the myth the brothers are given the task of equipping all living creatures with their means of survival; Epimetheus takes the job and hands out the gifts, speed, claws, fur, wings, so lavishly to the animals that when he reaches humankind nothing is left, and it falls to Prometheus to make good the shortfall by stealing fire. His defining act, told in Hesiod, is his acceptance of Pandora: warned by Prometheus never to take a gift from Zeus, Epimetheus forgets the warning and receives the first woman, who opens the jar that looses toil, sickness and death upon the human race. He is, in short, the god of learning too late.

Epimetheus and Prometheus form one of the clearest cases in Greek myth of what scholars of naming call a speaking name, or nomen loquens, deployed as a deliberate pair: both names build on the same root, metis, thought or cunning intelligence, attached to opposite prefixes, pro, before, and epi, after, so the myth quite literally personifies foresight and hindsight as brothers and sets their contrasting natures to work against each other in a single connected story, forethought correcting, at real cost, what afterthought has already ruined. Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days give the earlier, sparser version of their story, but the philosopher Plato, writing his dialogue Protagoras in the fourth century BCE, supplies by far the fullest ancient account of the specific episode in which the brothers are tasked with distributing survival qualities among the newly created mortal and animal creatures, using the myth as a philosophical set piece to open a debate about whether civic virtue can be taught, a use of the old story considerably more sophisticated than anything in Hesiod's brief genealogical treatment.

Because Plato's version is both fuller and considerably later than Hesiod's, classicists read the detailed picture of Epimetheus lavishing gifts on the animals and leaving nothing for humanity as substantially Plato's own philosophical elaboration built on a much sparser inherited outline, rather than a scene Hesiod himself described in comparable detail, a reminder that a myth's most vivid, most often retold version is not always its oldest or most original one.