"Why should I care for what Athena told me?" she said at last. "She is
not beautiful, and jewels would be of no use to her. I think that I will
look at them, at any rate. Athena will never know. Nobody else will
ever know."
She opened the lid a very little, just to peep inside. All at once there
was a whirring, rustling sound, and before she could shut it down again,
out flew ten thousand strange creatures with death-like faces and gaunt
and dreadful forms, such as nobody in all the world had ever seen. They
fluttered for a little while about the room, and then flew away to find
dwelling-places wherever there were homes of men. They were diseases and
cares; for up to that time mankind had not had any kind of sickness, nor
felt any troubles of mind, nor worried about what the morrow might bring
forth.
These creatures flew into every house, and, without any one seeing them,
nestled down in the bosoms of men and women and children, and put an end
to all their joy; and ever since that day they have been flitting and
creeping, unseen and unheard, over all the land, bringing pain and
sorrow and death into every household.
If Pandora had not shut down the lid so quickly, things would have gone
much worse. But she closed it just in time to keep the last of the evil
creatures from getting out. The name of this creature was Foreboding,
and although he was almost half out of the casket, Pandora pushed him
back and shut the lid so tight that he could never escape. If he had
gone out into the world, men would have known from childhood just what
troubles were going to come to them every day of their lives, and they
would never have had any joy or hope so long as they lived.
And this was the way in which Jupiter sought to make mankind more
miserable than they had been before Prometheus had befriended them.
III. HOW THE FRIEND OF MEN WAS PUNISHED.
The next thing that Jupiter did was to punish Prometheus for stealing
fire from the sun. He bade two of his servants, whose names were
Strength and Force, to seize the bold Titan and carry him to the topmost
peak of the Caucasus Mountains. Then he sent the blacksmith Vulcan to
bind him with iron chains and fetter him to the rocks so that he could
not move hand or foot.
Vulcan did not like to do this, for he was a friend of Prometheus, and
yet he did not dare to disobey. And so the great friend of men, who had
given them fire and lifted them out of their wretchedness and shown them
how to live, was chained to the mountain peak; and there he hung, with
the storm-winds whistling always around him, and the pitiless hail
beating in his face, and fierce eagles shrieking in his ears and tearing
his body with their cruel claws. Yet he bore all his sufferings without
a groan, and never would he beg for mercy or say that he was sorry for
what he had done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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