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?