The myth of Pandora is ancient, appears in several distinct Greek versions, and has been interpreted in many ways. In all literary versions, however, the myth is a kind of theodicy, addressing the question of why there is evil in the world. In the seventh century BC, Hesiod, both in his ''Theogony'' (briefly, without naming Pandora outright, line 570) and in ''Works and Days'', gives the earliest literary version of the Pandora story; however, there is an older mention of jars or urns containing blessings and evils bestowed upon mankind in Homer's ''Iliad'':

The immortals know no care, yet the lot they spin for man is full of sorrow; on the floor of Zeus' palace there stand two urns, the one filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones. He for whom Zeus the lord of thunder mixes the gifts he sends, will meet now with good and now with evil fortune; but he to whom Zeus sends none but evil gifts will be pointed at by the finger of scorn, the hand of famine will pursue him to the ends of the world, and he will go up and down the face of the earth, respected neither by gods nor men.

Hesiod's ''Theogony''

The Pandora myth first appears in lines 560–612 of Hesiod's poem in epic meter, the ''Theogony'' (ca. 8th–7th centuries BC), without ever giving the woman a name. After humans received the stolen gift of fire from Prometheus, an angry Zeus decides to give men 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 race of men. After Hephaestus does so, Athena dressed her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands and an ornate crown of gold. 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):

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 helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.

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 concedes that occasionally a man finds a good wife, but still (609) "evil contends with good."

Hesiod's ''Works and Days''

Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house, she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not fly away. Before [she could], Pandora replaced the lid of the jar. This was the will of aegis-bearing Zeus the Cloudgatherer.

He does not tell the reader why hope remained in the jar.

Hesiod closes with this moral (105): "Thus it is not possible to escape the mind of Zeus."

Later embellishments

Later mythographers filled in minor details or added postscripts to Hesiod's account. For example, Apollodorus and Hyginus each make explicit what might be latent in the Hesiodic text: Epimetheus married Pandora. They each add that they had a daughter, Pyrrha, who married Deucalion and survived the deluge with him. However, the Hesiodic ''Catalogue of Women'', fragment #2, had made a "Pandora" one of the ''daughters'' of Deucalion, and the mother of Graecus by Zeus. The 15th-century monk Annio da Viterbo credited a manuscript that he asserted that he had found to the Chaldean historian of the 3rd century BC, Berossus, where "Pandora" was also named as a daughter-in-law of Noah; this attempt to conjoin pagan and scriptural narrative is recognized as a forgery.

In a major departure from Hesiod, the 6th-century BC Greek elegiac poet Theognis of Megara tells us:

Hope is the only good god remaining among mankind; the others have left and gone to Olympus. Trust, a mighty god has gone, Restraint has gone from men, and the Graces, my friend, have abandoned the earth. Men’s judicial oaths are no longer to be trusted, nor does anyone revere the immortal gods; the race of pious men has perished and men no longer recognize the rules of conduct or acts of piety.

Theognis seems to be hinting at a myth in which the jar contained blessings rather than evils. In this, he appears to follow a possibly pre-Hesiodic tradition, preserved by the second-century fabulist Babrius, that the gods sent a jar containing blessings to humans. A "foolish man" (not Pandora) opened the jar, and most of the blessings were lost forever. Only hope remained, "to promise each of us the good things that fled."

An independent Pandora tradition that does not square with any of the literary sources is the tradition in the visual repertory of Attic red-figure vase-painters, which sometimes supplements, sometimes ignores, the written testimony; in these representations the upper part of Pandora is visible rising from the earth, "a chthonic goddess like Gaia herself." Sometimes, but not always, she is labeled ''Pandora''.

Difficulties of interpretation

Historic interpretations of the Pandora figure are rich enough to have offered Erwin Panofsky scope for monographic treatment. M. L. West writes that the story of Pandora and her jar is from a pre-Hesiodic myth, and that this explains the confusion and problems with Hesiod's version and its inconclusiveness. He writes that in earlier myths, Pandora was married to Prometheus, and cites the ancient Hesiodic ''Catalogue of Women'' as preserving this older tradition, and that the jar may have at one point contained only good things for mankind. He also writes that it may have been that Epimetheus and Pandora and their roles were transposed in the pre-Hesiodic myths, a "mythic inversion". He remarks that there is a curious correlation between Pandora being made out of earth in Hesiod's story, to what is in Apollodorus that Prometheus created man from water and earth. Hesiod's myth of Pandora's jar, then, could be an amalgam of many variant early myths.

In Hesiodic scholarship, the interpretive crux has endured: Is the imprisonment of hope inside a jar full of evils for mankind a benefit for mankind, or a further bane? A number of mythology textbooks echo the sentiments of M. L. West: "[Hope's retention in the jar] is comforting, and we are to be thankful for this antidote to our present ills." Some scholars such as Mark Griffith, however, take the opposite view: "[Hope] seems to be a blessing withheld from men so that their life should be the more dreary and depressing." One's interpretation hangs on two related questions: First, how are we to render ''elpis'', the Greek word usually translated as "hope"? Second, does the jar preserve ''Elpis'' for men, or keep ''Elpis'' away from men?

The first question might confuse the non-specialist. But as with most ancient Greek words, ''elpis'' can be translated a number of ways. A number of scholars prefer the neutral translation of "expectation." But expectation of what? Classical authors use the word ''elpis'' to mean "expectation of bad," as well as "expectation of good." Statistical analysis demonstrates that the latter sense appears five times more than the former in all of ancient Greek literature. Others hold the minority view that ''elpis'' should be rendered, "expectation of evil" (''vel sim'').

How one answers the first question largely depends on the answer to the second question: should we interpret the jar to function as a prison, or a pantry? The jar certainly serves as a prison for the evils that Pandora released – they only affect mankind once outside the jar. Some have argued that logic dictates, therefore, that the jar acts as a prison for ''Elpis'' as well, withholding it from men. If one takes ''elpis'' to mean expectant hope, then the myth's tone is pessimistic: All the evils in the world were scattered from Pandora's jar, while the one potentially mitigating force, Hope, remains locked securely inside.

This interpretation raises yet another question, complicating the debate: are we to take Hope in an absolute sense, or in a narrow sense where we understand Hope to mean hope only as it pertains to the evils released from the jar? If Hope is imprisoned in the jar, does this mean that human existence is utterly hopeless? This is the most pessimistic reading possible for the myth. A less pessimistic interpretation (still pessimistic, to be sure) understands the myth to say: countless evils fled Pandora's jar and plague human existence; the hope that we might be able to master these evils remains imprisoned inside the jar. Life is not hopeless, but each of us is hopelessly human.

It is also argued that hope was simply one of the evils in the jar, the false kind of hope, and was no good for mankind, since, later in the poem, Hesiod writes that hope is empty (498) and no good (500) and makes mankind lazy by taking away his industriousness, making him prone to evil.

In ''Human, All Too Human'', philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that "Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment."

An objection to the ''hope is good/the jar is a prison'' interpretation counters that, if the jar is full of evils, then what is expectant hope – a blessing – doing among them? This objection leads some to render ''elpis'' as the expectation of evil, which would make the myth's tone somewhat optimistic: although humankind is troubled by all the evils in the world, at least we are spared the continual expectation of evil, which would make life unbearable.

The optimistic reading of the myth is expressed by M. L. West. ''Elpis'' takes the more common meaning of expectant hope. And while the jar served as a prison for the evils that escaped, it thereafter serves as a residence for Hope. West explains, "It would be absurd to represent either the presence of ills by their confinement in a jar or the presence of hope by its escape from one." Hope is thus preserved as a benefit for humans.

''Pithos'' into "box"

The mistranslation of ''pithos'', a large storage jar, as "box" 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. It can also refer to a funerary jar.

Erasmus, however, translated ''pithos'' into the Latin word ''pyxis'', meaning "box". The phrase "Pandora's box" has endured ever since.

All-giving Pandora: a mythic inversion

This connection of Pandora to Gaea and Demeter through the name Anesidora provides a clue as to Pandora's evolution as a mythic figure. In classical scholarship it is generally posited that—for female deities in particular—one or more secondary mythic entities sometimes "splinter off" (so to speak) from a primary entity, assuming aspects of the original in the process. The most famous example of this is the putative division of all the aspects of the so-called Great Goddess into a number of goddesses with more specialized functions—Gaea, Demeter, Persephone, Artemis and Hecate among them. Pandora appears to be just such a product of this process. In a previous incarnation now lost to us, Pandora/Anesidora would have taken on aspects of Gaea and Demeter. She would embody the fertility of the earth and its capacity to bear grain and fruits for the benefit of humankind. Jane Ellen Harrison turned to the repertory of vase-painters to shed light on aspects of myth that were left unaddressed or disguised in literature. The story of Pandora was repeated on Greek ceramics. On a fifth century amphora in the Ashmolean Museum (her fig.71) the half-figure of Pandora emerges from the ground, her arms upraised in the epiphany gesture, to greet Epimetheus. A winged ''ker'' with a fillet hovers overhead: "Pandora rises from the earth; she ''is'' the Earth, giver of all gifts," Harrison observes. Over time this "all-giving" goddess somehow devolved into an "all-gifted" mortal woman. T. A. Sinclair, commenting on ''Works and Days'' argues that Hesiod shows no awareness of the mythology of such a divine "giver". A.H. Smith, however, notes that in Hesiod's account Athena and the Seasons brought wreaths of grass and spring flowers to Pandora, indicating that Hesiod was conscious of Pandora's original "all-giving" function. Jane Ellen Harrison sees in Hesiod's story "evidence of a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in Greek culture. As the life-bringing goddess Pandora is eclipsed, the death-bringing human Pandora arises." Thus Harrison concludes "in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and diminished. She is no longer Earth-Born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus." (Harrison 1922:284). Robert Graves, quoting Harrison, asserts of the Hesiodic episode that "Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention." H.J. Rose wrote that the myth of Pandora is decidedly more illiberal than that of epic in that it makes Pandora the origin of all of Man's woes with her being the exemplification of the bad wife.

The Hesiodic myth did not, however, completely obliterate the memory of the all-giving goddess Pandora. A scholium to line 971 of Aristophanes' ''The Birds'' mentions a cult "to Pandora, the earth, because she bestows all things necessary for life".

In fifth-century Athens, Pandora made a prominent appearance in what, at first, appears an unexpected context, in a marble relief or bronze appliqués as a frieze along the base of the ''Athena Parthenos'', the culminating experience on the Acropolis. Jeffrey M. Hurwit has interpreted her presence there as an "anti-Athena." Both were motherless, and reinforced via opposite means the civic ideologies of patriarchy and the "highly gendered social and political realities of fifth-century Athens" - Athena by rising above her sex to defend it, and Pandora by embodying the need for it. Meanwhile, Pausanias (i.24.7) merely noted the subject and moved on.

Pandora's relationship to Eve of the Genesis account

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Category:Article Feedback Pilot Category:Greek mythology Category:Creation myths Category:Women in Greek mythology

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