In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman, created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus."Scatter-brained [of Zeus the woman, the maiden whom he had formed." (Hesiod, Theogony 510 ff. (Hugh G. White, translator) As Hesiod related it, each deity cooperated by giving her unique gifts. Her other name—inscribed against her figure on a white-ground kylix in the British MuseumB.M. 1881,0528.1: white-ground cup from Nola, painted by the Tarquinia painter, c. 470–460 BC (British Museum on-line catalogue entry)—is Anesidora.
The Pandora myth is a kind of theodicy, addressing the question of why there is evil in the world, according to which, Pandora opened a jar (pithos; commonly referred to as "Pandora's jar") releasing all the evils of humanity. It has been argued that Hesiod's interpretation of Pandora's story went on to influence both Jewish and Christian theology and so perpetuated her bad reputation into the Renaissance. Later poets, dramatists, painters, and sculptors made her their subject. Prior to the Renaissance, the container was translated correctly as "a jar" and it was said to have contained "blessings" for humanity.
Hesiod Hesiod, both in his Theogony (briefly, without naming Pandora outright, line 570) and in Works and Days, gives the earliest version of the Pandora story.
Theogony The Pandora myth first appeared in lines 560–612 of Hesiod's poem in epic meter, the Theogony (c. 8th–7th centuries BCE), without ever giving the woman a name. After humans received the stolen gift of fire from Prometheus, an angry Zeus decides to give humanity a punishing gift to compensate for the boon they had been given. He commands Hephaestus to mold from earth the first woman, a "beautiful evil" whose descendants would torment the human race. After Hephaestus does so, Athena dresses her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands, and an ornate crown of silver. This woman goes unnamed in the Theogony, but is presumably Pandora, whose myth Hesiod revisited in Works and Days. When she first appears before gods and mortals, "wonder seized them" as they looked upon her. But she was "sheer guile, not to be withstood by men". Hesiod elaborates (590–93):
For from her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.Hesiod, Theogony 590–593.
Hesiod goes on to lament that men who try to avoid the evil of women by avoiding marriage will fare no better (604–7):
[He] reaches deadly old age without anyone to tend his years, and though he at least has no lack of livelihood while he lives, yet, when he is dead, his kinsfolk divide his possessions amongst them.Hesiod, Theogony 604–607.
Hesiod concedes that occasionally a man finds a good wife, but still (609) "evil contends with good".
Works and Days
The more famous version of the Pandora myth comes from another of Hesiod's poems, Works and Days. In this version of the myth (lines 60–105),Hesiod, Works and Days 60–105. Hesiod expands upon her origin and moreover widens the scope of the misery she inflicts on humanity. As before, she is created by Hephaestus, but now more gods contribute to her completion (63–82): Athena taught her needlework and weaving (63–4); Aphrodite "shed grace upon her head and cruel longing and cares that weary the limbs" (65–6); Hermes gave her "a shameless mind and a deceitful nature" (67–8); Hermes also gave her the power of speech, putting in her "lies and crafty words" (77–80); Athena then clothed her (72); next Persuasion and the Charites adorned her with necklaces and other finery (72–4); the Horae adorned her with a garland crown (75). Finally, Hermes gives this woman a name: "Pandora [i.e. "All-Gift"], because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread" (81–2).For details on the meaning of the name "Pandora" see "Difficulties of Interpretation" below.
In this retelling of her story, Pandora's deceitful feminine nature becomes the least of humanity's worries. For she brings with her a jar (which, due to textual corruption in the sixteenth century, came to be called a box)A pithos is a very large jar, usually made of rough-grained terra cotta, used for storage.Cf. Verdenius, p. 64, comment on line 94, on pithos. "Yet Pandora is unlikely to have brought along the jar of ills from heaven, for Hes. would not have omitted describing such an important detail. According to Proclus, Prometheus had received the jar of ills from the satyrs and deposited it with Epimetheus, urging him not to accept Pandora. Maz. [Paul Mazon in his Hesiode] suggests that Prometheus probably had persuaded the satyrs to steal the jar from Zeus, when the latter was about to pour them out over humanity. This may have been a familiar tale which Hes. thought unnecessary to relate."Contra West 1978, p. 168: "Hesiod omits to say where the jar came from, what Pandora had in mind when she opened it, and what exactly it contained". West goes on to say this contributes to the "inconclusive Pandora legend". containing "countless plagues" (100). Prometheus had (fearing further reprisals) warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from Zeus. But Epimetheus did not listen; he accepted Pandora, who promptly scattered the contents of her jar. As a result, Hesiod tells us, the earth and sea are "full of evils" (101). One item, however, did not escape the jar (96–9):
Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds.
Hesiod does not say why Hope (Elpis) remained in the jar.Regarding line 96. Verdenius, p. 66 says that Hesiod "does not tell us why elpis remained in the jar. There is a vast number of modern explanations, of which I shall discuss only the most important ones. They may be divided into two classes according as they presume that the jar served (1) to keep elpis for man, or (2) to keep off elpis from man. In the first case the jar is used as a pantry, in the second case it is used as a prison (just as in Hom. E 387). Furthermore, elpis may be regarded either (a) as a good, or (b) as an evil. In the first case it is to comfort man in his misery and a stimulus rousing his activity, in the second case it is the idle hope in which the lazy man indulges when he should be working honestly for his living (cf. 498). The combination of these alternatives results in four possibilities which we shall now briefly consider." Hesiod closes with a moral (105): there is "no way to escape the will of Zeus."
After recounting this tale, Hesiod moves on to what he describes as "another story" (),Van Noorden, p. 44; Hesiod, Works and Days 106 (Most, pp. 94–95). Most's translation is quoted here; Van Noorden's translation is "another/alternative account". telling of humanity's decline through five ages: the Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron.Hesiod, Works and Days 109–201 (Most, pp. 94–103). According to Fontenrose, p. 1 n. 1, "age" is a "not wholly satisfactory translation" of Hesiod's (), though he also rejects "race" as "both misleading and inaccurate". Compare with Van Noorden, passim, who uses "race". According to Geoffrey Kirk, in Hesiod's arrangement of the two myths, Pandora's status as the world's first woman would seem to imply that only men existed in the Golden Age.Kirk, p. 229. In Stephanie Nelson's view, the two stories are "irreconcilable", as Pandora cannot be placed within any of the five ages.Nelson, p. 68. Similarly, Fontenrose, p. 2 analyses the transitions between the five ages, reasoning that each cannot be matched with the story of Pandora, and concluding that the two myths are "entirely separate". She writes that the world moves from good to evil "within the Pandora myth", whereas in the story of the five ages this occurs "between the various ages".Nelson, p. 68. Nelson adds that the reason for this is that Hesiod gives Zeus an "anthropomorphic will" in the former story, but not in the latter. Helen Van Noorden argues that the latter myth should be understood as an "alternative" to the story of Pandora, rather than a "free-standing construction".Van Noorden, pp. 39–40.
Post Hesiod Following Hesiod, Archaic and Classic Greek literature seem to make little further mention of Pandora, but mythographers later filled in minor details or added postscripts to Hesiod's account. For example, the Bibliotheca and Hyginus each make explicit what might be latent in the Hesiodic text: Epimetheus married Pandora. Hyginus's Fabulae retains this detail and adds that, rather than merely giving gifts, Athena (Minerva) was also the one who granted Pandora life.Hyginus, https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Genealogiarum_liber/Fabulae#CXLII._PANDORA. Fabulae 142 (via Wikisource)
They each add that the couple had a daughter, Pyrrha, who married Deucalion and survived the deluge with him. In the 15th-century AD an attempt was made to conjoin pagan and scriptural narrative by the monk Annio da Viterbo, who claimed to have found an account by the ancient Chaldean historian Berossus in which "Pandora" was named as a daughter-in-law of Noah in the alternative flood narrative.
Pithos into "box"
The mistranslation of pithos, a large storage jar, as "box"The development of this transformation was sketched by Jane Ellen Harrison, "Pandora's Box" The Journal of Hellenic Studies 20 (1900: 99–114); she traced the mistranslation as far as Lilius Giraldus of Ferrara, in his Historiarum Deorum Syntagma (1580), in which pithos was rendered pyxide, and she linked the pithos with the Pithoigia aspect of the Athenian festival of Anthesteria. is usually attributed to the sixteenth century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam when he translated Hesiod's tale of Pandora into Latin. Hesiod's pithos refers to a large storage jar, often half-buried in the ground, used for wine, oil or grain.Cf. Verdenius, p. 64. It can also refer to a funerary jar.Cf. Harrison, Jane Ellen, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Chapter II, The Pithoigia, pp. 42–43. Cf. also Figure 7 which shows an ancient Greek vase painting in the University of Jena where Hermes is presiding over a body in a pithos buried in the ground. "In the vase painting in fig.7 from a lekythos in the University Museum of Jena we see a Pithoigia of quite other and solemn intent. A large pithos is sunk deep into the ground. It has served as a grave. ... The vase-painting in fig. 7 must not be regarded as an actual conscious representation of the Athenian rite performed on the first day of the Anthesteria. It is more general in content; it is in fact simply a representation of ideas familiar to every Greek, that the pithos was a grave-jar, that from such grave-jars souls escaped and to them necessarily returned, and that Hermes was Psychopompos, Evoker and Revoker of souls. The vase-painting is in fact only another form of the scene so often represented on Athenian white lekythoi, in which the souls flutter round the grave-stele. The grave-jar is but the earlier form of sepulture; the little winged figures, the Keres, are identical in both classes of vase-painting." Erasmus, however, translated pithos into the Latin word pyxis, meaning "box".According to West 1978, p. 168, Erasmus "probably" confused the story of Pandora with the story found elsewhere of a box which was opened by Psyche; the Panofskys (1956) follow him in this surmise. The inaccurate phrase "Pandora's box" has endured ever since in popular references.
Difficulties of interpretation