O Cronus and Iapetus and you, O mother (Earth)! What a fate I suffer, luckless that I am, when I have done no harm.

No harm, Prometheus? In the first place you undertook to serve out our meat and did it so unfairly and trickily that you abstracted all the best of it for yourself and cheated Zeus by wrapping “bones in glistening fat”: for I remember that Hesiod says so.Theogony 541. The story was invented to account for the burning of bones wrapped in fat at sacrifice. Then you made human beings, thoroughly unprincipled creatures, particularly the women; and to top all, you stole fire, the most valued possession of the gods, and actually gave that to men. When you have done so much harm, do you say that you have been put in irons without having done any wrong?