Why did Prometheus steal fire, and what did the Greeks make of the story?

Prometheus stole fire because he was a Titan who aided humanity and defied the Olympian gods, and the Greeks told the theft in very different ways. In the earliest account, by Hesiod, the quarrel starts with dinner. At a sacrificial meal at Mecone that marked the settling of accounts between mortals and immortals, Prometheus set two offerings before Zeus: beef hidden inside an ox's stomach, and the bull's bones wrapped in glistening fat. Zeus chose the fat-wrapped bones, and from then on humans would keep the meat for themselves and burn the bones in fat as an offering to the gods.

The trick angered Zeus, and in Hesiod's version he withdrew fire, which humans already knew. Prometheus stole it back, and Zeus punished him by binding him to a rock, where an eagle ate his liver every day and it grew back each night. According to several major versions, most notably Hesiod's, the hero Heracles eventually freed him.

Humanity paid too. In Works and Days, Zeus sends Pandora, who carries a jar from which mischief, sorrow, plague and diseases are released.

Centuries later, the tragedian Aeschylus told it differently. In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus claims to have taught people the arts of civilisation: writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine and science. The same stolen fire, a different story: one version explains why life is hard, the other why humans are clever.