Prometheus (6-10)

HERMES

Just as if long speeches and adequate preparation were necessary, Prometheus, and it were not enough simply to summarize your wrong-doings and say that when you were commissioned to divide the meat you tried to keep the best for yourself “and cheat the king, and that you made men when you should not, and that you stole fire from us and took it to them! You do not seem to realize, my excellent friend, that you have found Zeus very humane in view of such actions. Now if you deny that you have committed them, I shall have to have it out with you and make a long speech and try my best to bring out the truth; but if you admit that you served the meat in that

way and made the innovations in regard to men and stole fire, my accusation is sufficient and I don’t care to say any more; to do so would be a mere waste of words.

PROMETHEUS

Perhaps what you have said is also a waste of words; we shall see a little later! But as you say your accusation is sufficient, I shall try as best I can to dissipate the charges. And first let me tell you about the meat. By Heaven, even now as I speak of it I blush for Zeus, if he is so mean and fault-finding as to send a prehistoric god like me to be crucified just because he found a small bone in his portion, without remembering how we fought side by side or thinking how slight the ground for his anger is and how. childish it is to “be angry and enraged unless he gets the lion’s share himself.

PROMETHEUS

Deceptions of that sort, Hermes, occurring at table, should not be remembered, but if a mistake is made among people who are having a good time, it should be considered a practical joke and one’s anger should be left behind there in the dining room. To store up one’s hatred against the morrow, to hold spite and to cherish a stale grudge—come, it is not seemly for gods and in any case not kingly. Anyhow, if dinners are deprived of these attractions, of trickery, jokes, mockery and ridicule, all that is left is drunkenness, repletion and silence; gloomy, joyless things, all of them, not in the least appropriate to a dinner. So I should not have thought that Zeus would even

remember the affair until the next day, to say nothing of taking on so about it and considering he had been horribly treated if someone in serving meat played a joke to see if the chooser could tell which was the better portion.

PROMETHEUS

Suppose, however, Hermes, that it was more serious—that instead of giving Zeus the smaller portion I had abstracted the whole of it—what then? Just because of that ought he to have mingled earth with heaven, as the saying goes, and ought he to conjure up irons and crosses and a whole Caucasus and send down eagles and pick out my liver? Doesn’t all this accuse the angered man himself of great pettiness and meanness of disposition and readiness to get angry? What would he have done in ease he had been choused out of a whole ox, if he wreaks such mighty deeds about a little meat?

PROMETHEUS

How much more good-natured human beings are about such things! One would expect them to be more quick to wrath than the gods, but in spite of that there is not one among them who would propose to crucify his cook if “he dipped his finger into the broth while the meat was boiling and licked off a little, or if he pulled off a bit of the roast and gobbled it up. No, they pardon them. To be sure, if they are extremely angry, they give them a slap or hit them over the head; but among them nobody was ever crucified on so trivial a ground. So much for the meat—an unseemly plea for me to make, but a far more unseemly accusation for him to bring;