Pandora and the jar

In Hesiod, Pandora opens a large storage jar, not a box; the box arrived in 1508 with a Latin retelling by Erasmus.

The price of fire

After Prometheus stole fire, Zeus laughed and said he would give humans an evil in exchange, something they would love and welcome even as it harmed them. This is Hesiod’s story of the first woman. It appears twice: in the Theogony, where she is not named, and in Works and Days, where she is called Pandora. Both poems treat her as a punishment, and modern readers notice how harshly Hesiod speaks about women. It helps to read the myth as what it is: the view of one poet, a farmer in Boeotia around 700 BCE, explaining why life is hard.

Made by the gods

In Works and Days, Zeus orders Hephaestus to mix earth with water, give it a human voice and strength, and shape it into a lovely young woman with the face of a goddess. Athena teaches her weaving. Aphrodite pours grace and longing over her head. Hermes, the guide of travellers and thieves, gives her a "dog-like mind and thieving ways" and the gift of speech filled with lies. The Graces and Persuasion hang gold necklaces on her, and the Hours crown her with spring flowers. Hermes names her Pandora, the poem explains, because all the gods on Olympus had given her a gift. Pan means "all" and doron means "gift".

A jar, not a box

Hesiod’s word is pithos, a large clay storage jar of the kind Greek households used for grain, oil or wine. The famous phrase "Pandora’s box" comes from a mistake. When the Dutch scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam retold the myth in Latin in his collection of proverbs, the Adagia, in 1508, he used the word pyxis, a small lidded box. The box stuck, and painters and writers repeated it for centuries. Some scholars also point to a neat parallel in the original: Pandora herself was shaped from earth and water, like the clay jar she opens.

Why does Hope stay inside?

The ending has puzzled readers since antiquity. The Greek word is elpis, which can mean hope but also expectation, including the expectation of bad things. If the jar held evils, is hope one more evil, kept from us? Or is it a comfort that remains with humans while the evils roam free? The classicist Timothy Gantz suggested that elpis here may mean a realistic sense of how bad things will get, so that keeping it in the jar spares people from knowing the full weight of their troubles. Hesiod does not explain, and there is no agreed answer.

Another question is whose jar it was. Hesiod never says that Pandora brought it with her from Olympus, and some scholars think it was already standing in Epimetheus’s house. Right after the Pandora story, Works and Days tells a second account of why life is hard: the five ages of humans. First came a golden race who lived like gods, then a weaker silver race, a violent bronze race, the race of heroes who fought at Thebes and Troy, and finally our own iron race, which works and suffers every day.