Pandora

• 1. Introduction

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  Pandora was, according to Greek myth, the first human woman ever made. Not born, but built: molded from earth by Hephaestus on the direct orders of Zeus, then passed from god to god like a package being assembled, each deity tucking in a different curse disguised as a blessing. Athena gave her weaving. Aphrodite gave her grace and longing. Hermes gave her a shameless mind, a deceitful nature, and the gift of speech filled with lies. When she finally stood before the gods and mortals, wonder seized them at the sight of her. Then she opened a jar, and everything changed.

  Her name, as Hesiod tells it, means "all-gift". Every god on Olympus contributed something to her making, and the word for that collective act became her identity. But the name carries a second meaning that Hesiod may have been quietly suppressing: an older tradition calls her "all-giving", a generous earth goddess rather than a punishing instrument. These two Pandoras, the giver of gifts and the bearer of plagues, have been arguing with each other across nearly three thousand years of poetry, painting, theology, and opera. The jar, meanwhile, was not even a box until the sixteenth century.

• 2. Hesiod's Two Versions

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  Hesiod told Pandora's story twice, and the two versions do not quite agree. The first appears in the Theogony, dated to roughly the 8th-7th centuries BCE, in lines 560-612. Here the woman has no name at all. Zeus commands her creation as punishment for humanity receiving fire from Prometheus, and Hephaestus molds her from earth. Athena dresses her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands, and an ornate crown of silver. She is described as "sheer guile, not to be withstood by men". Hesiod is especially bitter about her descendants: the women who "live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth."

  The second telling, in Works and Days at lines 60-105, is more detailed and more damning. Here the gods take turns contributing to her completion. Hermes not only gives her a deceitful nature but also fills her mouth with "lies and crafty words". It is only in this poem that she gets her name. Hermes names her Pandora because all those who dwelt on Olympus gave her a gift, each one a plague to men who eat bread. In this version she brings with her a jar containing countless plagues. Prometheus had warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from Zeus, but Epimetheus did not listen. He accepted Pandora, who promptly scattered the jar's contents across the earth and sea.

  One thing did not escape. Hope, which Hesiod calls Elpis, remained trapped inside the jar under its rim, stopped there by the will of Zeus. Hesiod offers no explanation for why Hope stayed behind.

• 3. A Goddess Turned Scapegoat

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  A white-ground kylix dated to around 460 BCE, held in the British Museum, carries the name Anesidora written above a figure of the first woman being finished by Hephaestus and Athena. Anesidora means "she who sends up gifts", and the epithet is more commonly applied to Gaea or Demeter, goddesses of the earth itself. On a fifth-century amphora in the Ashmolean Museum, Pandora's half-figure rises from the ground with arms raised in an epiphany gesture, a winged ker hovering above her. Jane Ellen Harrison read this as decisive: "Pandora rises from the earth; she is the Earth, giver of all gifts."

  M. L. West, working from this and related evidence, argued that the story Hesiod told drew on a much older pre-Hesiodic myth in which Pandora was married not to Epimetheus but to Prometheus himself, and in which the jar may once have held only good things for humanity. The ancient Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, he argued, preserved traces of this earlier version. What Hesiod may have done was perform a "mythic inversion", swapping the roles of the two brothers and reversing the contents of the jar.

  Classics scholars cited by William E. Phipps concluded that Hesiod took a name meaning "all-giving" and reframed it as "all-gifted", transforming a generous deity into a passive, dangerous recipient. Harrison put it plainly: Hesiod's story provides evidence of a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in Greek culture. Robert Graves, drawing on Harrison's work, called the Hesiodic episode "not a genuine myth, but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention." Hesiod did leave one trace of the older figure, however: he noted that Athena and the Seasons brought wreaths of grass and spring flowers to Pandora, an image that faintly echoes her original function as a giver of the earth's abundance.

• 4. How a Jar Became a Box

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  Erasmus of Rotterdam, the sixteenth-century humanist, is the person usually blamed for the most famous mistranslation in classical mythology. When he rendered Hesiod's tale into Latin, he turned the Greek word pithos, which refers to a large storage jar often half-buried in the ground and used for wine, oil, or grain, into the Latin pyxis, meaning box. The phrase "Pandora's box" has endured in every European language ever since, though the original object was nothing of the kind.

  The change matters more than it might seem. A pithos was an enormous, heavy container, the kind of vessel that held a household's food supply or, in some uses, a body. It was not something easily carried or casually opened out of curiosity. The substitution of a portable box shifted the register of the story: what had been an act tied to storage and the earth became an act of prying, a small domestic transgression. Pandora with a box looks more like a nosy woman than a figure at the center of a cosmological event.

  The sixteenth century was also when theological comparisons between Pandora and Eve were reaching their peak. Bishop Jean Olivier's long Latin poem Pandora, first appearing in 1541, drew on both the classical account and scripture to argue that woman is the means of drawing men to sin. Two French translations followed in 1542 and 1548. The Protestant theologian Leonhard Culmann, born in 1498 and died in 1568, produced a five-act tragedy in 1544 titled Ein schon weltlich Spiel von der schonen Pandora that used Hesiod to teach conventional Christian morality. The mistranslated box arrived at exactly the moment when the story's misogynist potential was being most aggressively mined.

• 5. Pandora and Eve

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  Jean Cousin the Elder painted Eva Prima Pandora in 1550, and the title alone captures what early modern Europe had decided about both women. A naked figure reclines in a grotto. Her right elbow rests on a skull, and that hand holds an apple branch. Her left arm is wreathed by a snake. Her other hand rests on an unstopped jar. She is simultaneously Eve and Pandora, the first woman and the source of human suffering, collapsed into a single body.

  The theological connection went back further than Cousin's painting. Church Fathers had long argued that the Classical myth of Pandora made her a type of Eve: both are the first woman in their respective traditions, both preside over a fall from ease and plenty to suffering and death, and both act in ways that bring divine punishment. It has been argued that through the Hellenisation of Western Asia, the misogyny in Hesiod's account began openly to influence both Jewish and then Christian interpretations of scripture.

  In Juan de Horozco's Spanish emblem book Emblemas morales, published in 1589, an illustration shows Pandora opening an urn from which demons and angels emerge. The accompanying text condemns "female curiosity and the desire to learn by which the very first woman was deceived". By the seventeenth century that desire to learn had been equated with the female demand to share the male prerogative of education. Nicolas Regnier's 1626 painting, subtitled "Pandora", surrounded her with attributes of vanity: fine clothes, jewellery, a pot of gold coins. Pietro Paolini's Pandora of about 1632 shows her more interested in the effect of her pearls and fashionable headgear than in the evils escaping the jar she holds. The social message ran underneath: education and expensive adornment alike were only available to those who could afford them.

• 6. Pandora on Stage and Canvas

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  Pedro Calderon de la Barca's La Estatua de Prometeo, from 1670, turned the myth into an allegory of learning versus active life. In his telling, Prometheus molds a clay statue of Minerva and gives it life from a stolen sunbeam. Pandora herself plays only a passive role. The theme of a statue married by her creator connects more strongly with the story of Pygmalion than with Hesiod, and that same blurring appears in Voltaire's opera Pandore, written in 1740 but never produced. There, Jupiter falls in love with Prometheus's animated statue and, when prevented by Destiny from acting on that love, sends Destiny to tempt the new Eve into opening a box of curses as punishment for Earth's revolt against Heaven.

  Aumale de Corsenville's one-act verse melodrama Pandore, with music by Franz Ignaz Beck, was performed on the 2nd of July 1789, the eve of the French Revolution, and was soon forgotten in what followed. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a lyrical dramatic fragment between 1807 and 1808 that bears the title Pandora but focuses almost entirely on Epimetheus's longing for the wife who has abandoned him. One biographer read it as a philosophical transformation of Goethe's passion in old age for a teenaged girl.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Masque of Pandora, from 1876, gave her an oaken chest carved with figures and embossed with gold. When she finally opens it, she collapses in despair. Epimetheus, on returning, accepts joint responsibility rather than condemning her. The work was used as the basis for operas by Alfred Cellier in 1881 and by Eleanor Everest Freer in 1933. Gabriel Faure's opera Promethe in 1900 gave Pandore an equal part with the title character, called for a cast of hundreds, a huge orchestra, and an outdoor amphitheatre, and drew partly on Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound.

• 7. The Polyvalent Figure

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  James Barry labored for over a decade at the turn of the nineteenth century on his huge Birth of Pandora, a project he had been designing long before he put brush to canvas. An early drawing, preserved only in a print made of it by Luigi Schiavonetti, followed Hesiod closely and showed Pandora being adorned by the Graces and the Hours while the gods looked on. The ideological purpose was to demonstrate an equal society unified by harmonious function. But in the actual painting that followed much later, a subordinated Pandora is surrounded by gift-bearing gods while Minerva stands nearby, demonstrating the feminine arts proper to her passive role. The shift, as one reading of the work noted, is back toward a culture of blame.

  Alternative readings of Pandora's curiosity cast it as childish innocence rather than transgression. Walter Crane's "Little Pandora" shows a young girl spilling buttons while encumbered by a doll. Arthur Rackham's book illustration and Frederick Stuart Church's etching depict an adolescent girl taken aback by the contents of an ornamental box. Odilon Redon painted a clothed figure in 1910-12 carrying a box and merging into a light-suffused landscape, and in 1914 returned to the subject with a naked Pandora surrounded by flowers. These images, as a French poet earlier described the mood, show Pandora "naked and without alarm", more the victim of a conflict outside her comprehension than a temptress.

  By the late nineteenth century, depictions of Pandora had grown confused with other figures entirely: with one of the trials of Psyche, with Sophonisba about to drink poison, with Artemisia holding the ashes of her husband. Her very flexibility, the fact that she could be made to mean so many different things, had become the guarantee of her survival. The box with which she was not even endowed until the sixteenth century became, in the end, better known than the woman herself, and a scholium to line 971 of Aristophanes' The Birds still quietly preserves an older memory: a cult "to Pandora, the earth, because she bestows all things necessary for life".