Zeus keeps fire from humans, but Prometheus, a version of the trickster archetype, sneaks fire to mortals anyway and thus prompts Zeus’s retaliatory creation of the first woman. This first woman has no name; Zeus orders her manufacture (“The lovely evil he had made to countervail the good” [Theogony 585]), Hephaistos makes her from clay, and Athena dresses her. She and her miraculous adornment are called “marvels,” or marvelous to see, wonders that impress both gods and men. She is also a devouring, consuming woe to men; yet without her there are no children. Heterosexual reproduction is the price humans pay, at the hand of Zeus, for the civilizing force of fire; woman is the baleful counter-weight to Prometheus’s technological gift.
Introdustion to Hesiod