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.

 

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.

 

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 ?
 
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 ;