In Greek mythology, Pandora (ancient Greek, Πανδώρα , traditionally derived from πᾶν "all" and δῶρον "gift", thus "giver of all", "all-endowed") was the first woman. As Hesiod related it, each god helped create her by giving her unique gifts. Zeus ordered Hephaestus to mould her out of Earth as part of the punishment of mankind for Prometheus' theft of the secret of fire, and all the gods joined in offering this "beautiful evil" seductive gifts. Her other name, inscribed against her figure on a white-ground kylix in the British Museum, is Anesidora , "she who sends up gifts," up implying "from below" within the earth. According to the myth, Pandora opened a jar ( pithos ), in modern accounts referred to as "Pandora's box", releasing all the evils of mankind— although the particular evils, aside from plagues and diseases, are not specified in detail by Hesiod — leaving only Hope inside once she had closed it again. She opened the jar out of simple curiosity and not as a malicious act.
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 epic poem in epic meter, the Theogony (ca. 8th–7th centuries BC), without ever giving the woman a name. After humans have 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 mould 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 helpmeets 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
The more famous version of the Pandora myth comes from another of Hesiod's poems, the Works and Days . In this version of the myth (lines 60–105), Hesiod expands upon her origin, and moreover widens the scope of the misery she inflicts on mankind. 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 shameful mind and 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 she, 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 – "All-gifted" – "because all the Olympians gave her a gift" (81). In this retelling of her story, Pandora's deceitful feminine nature becomes the least of mankind's worries. For she brings with her a jar containing "burdensome toil and sickness that brings death to men" (91–2), diseases (102) and "a myriad other pains" (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), hope:
Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house,
she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not
fly away. Before , 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
Archaic and Classic Greek literature seem to make no further mention of Pandora, though Sophocles wrote a satyr play Pandora, or The Hammerers of which virtually nothing is known. Sappho may have made reference to Pandora in a surviving fragment.
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 reprensentations 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
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