The first men are lifted out of the ground. In the oldest Greek telling gathered here, the Titan Prometheus stoops over the wet earth and shapes humankind by hand: he "moulded men out of water and" earth (ws), then stole for them the one thing clay cannot give itself, fire, which he had kept "hidden in a stalk of fennel" against the watching of Zeus. The witness is Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), where the modeling of the race and the theft of the flame are told in a single breath, so that the making of the body and the gift of warmth belong to the same act.

The served text carries the fingerprints of a later hand. The editor is Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish anthropologist whose annotated Apollodorus supplies the surrounding scholarship. Frazer's note is careful to mark how thin the ground under this famous scene really is: in the earliest layer of the legend, he observes, "Prometheus appears only as the benefactor, not the creator" of mankind, the potter's work of shaping men from mud being an addition that hardened around the older fire-bringer over time. The claylike substance itself the primary text names plainly as "water and" earth — no kiln, no breath, only the two elements a riverbank offers.

Across the shelf this address is one of the most crowded Thompson kept, the apparatus reaching from Babylonian to Maori to Quiché hands that each raise a person from dust; but only the Greek witness is wired to served text today, and those other makers wait unread. What stays with the reader is how modest the Greek scene is about its own miracle. A god does not speak humankind into being; he works the earth like a craftsman and then must steal the spark that lets the figure live. If the body is only shaped mud until fire is smuggled in beside it, what exactly did the theft add that the moulding could not?