We however who come before a crowd and offer our lectures, such as they are, show you a few figurines, and our modelling is entirely in mud as I said just now, like that of doll-makers. In general there is no movement in them that corresponds to life nor any indication of breathing. No, the whole business is empty enjoyment and play. So it’s occurring to me to wonder whether you are calling me Prometheus as the comic poet called Cleon Prometheus. He says of him, you remember, “Cleon’s a Prometheus after the event.” Eupolis, Frag. 456 Kock. The very Athenians used to call potters and oven-workers and all workers in clay “Prometheuses,” in jest at the clay or even perhaps the way they burn their products in the furnace. If your “Prometheus” means that, you have hit the mark well with an Attic pungency of wit, since our works too are as fragile as their pots—throw a little stone and you would smash the lot.

Yet someone might console me by saying “It was not in these respects that he compared you to Prometheus. No, he was praising your originality in following no exemplar, just as Prometheus at a time when no men existed fashioned them from his imagination, when he gave shape and form to such living creatures that they might move easily and be graceful to see. He was the master-craftsman, though Athena helped by breathing into the mud and making the models live.” That is what he might say, putting at least a gracious interpretation on your words, and perhaps that was what you meant. Yet I am not at all satisfied to be thought an innovator with no older model to father this work of mine. No, if it were not thought graceful as well, I should certainly be ashamed of it, believe me, and trample it under foot and destroy it. The originality would be no help, as far as I am concerned, to prevent the ugly thing’s being obliterated. If I didn’t think this, I should consider it right to have sixteen vultures tear me for not understanding how much uglier are the things which suffer this when they are combined with novelty.