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.
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?
