and now it is time to speak of my handiwork and the fact that I made men. This embodies a twofold accusation, Hermes, and I don’t know which charge you bring against me—that men should not have been created at all but would better have been left alone as mere clay, or that they should have been made, as far as that goes, but fashioned after some other pattern than this. However, I shall speak to both charges. In the first place I shall try to show that it has done the gods no harm to bring men into the world, and then that this is actually advantageous, far better for them than if the earth had happened to remain deserted and unpeopled.