In Greek mythology, Pandora (Greek: ???????, derived from ???, p?n, i.e. "all" and ?????, d?ron, i.e. "gift", thus "the all-endowed", "the all-gifted" or "the all-giving") was the first human woman created by the gods, specifically by Hephaestus and Athena on the instructions of Zeus. As Hesiod related it, each god helped create her by giving her unique gifts. Zeus ordered Hephaestus to mold her out of earth as part of the punishment of humanity for Prometheus' theft of the secret of fire, and all the gods joined in offering her "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 sometimes mistranslated as "Pandora's box" (see below), releasing all the evils of humanity--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.
The Pandora myth is a kind of theodicy, addressing the question of why there is evil in the world.
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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 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 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):
Hesiod goes on to lament that men who try to avoid the evil of women by avoiding marriage will fare no better (604-7):
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 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 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 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 Greek, Pandora has an active rather than a passive meaning; hence, Pandora properly means "All-giving." The implications of this mistranslation are explored in "All-giving Pandora: mythic inversion?" 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) 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):
Hesiod does not say why hope (elpis) remained in the jar.
Hesiod closes with this moral (105): "Thus it is not possible to escape the mind of Zeus."
Hesiod also outlines how the end of man's Golden Age, (an all-male society of immortals who were reverent to the gods, worked hard, and ate from abundant groves of fruit) was brought on by Prometheus, when he stole Fire from Mt. Olympus and gave it to mortal man, Zeus punished the technologically advanced society by creating woman. Thus, Pandora was created as the first woman and given the jar (mistranslated as 'box') which releases all evils upon man. The opening of the jar serves as the beginning of the Silver Age, in which man is now subject to death, and with the introduction of woman to birth as well, giving rise to the cycle of death and rebirth.
Maps Pandora
Homer
There is also a mention of jars or urns containing blessings and evils bestowed upon humanity in Homer's Iliad:
For two urns are set upon the floor of Zeus of gifts that he giveth, the one of ills, the other of blessings. To whomsoever Zeus, that hurleth the thunderbolt, giveth a mingled lot, that man meeteth now with evil, now with good; but to whomsoever he giveth but of the baneful, him he maketh to be reviled of man, and direful madness driveth him over the face of the sacred earth, and he wandereth honoured neither of gods nor mortals.
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, the Bibliotheca 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 #5, 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 he claimed to have 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:
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 Dora and 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 humanity. 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 the Bibliotheca 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 humanity a benefit for humanity, 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 humanity 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 the human race. 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 humanity, since, later in the poem, Hesiod writes that hope is empty (498) and no good (500) and makes humanity lazy by taking away their industriousness, making them 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 mankind 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?
The meaning of Pandora's name provided in Works and Days is "all-gifted". However, according to others Pandora more properly means "all-giving". Certain vase paintings dated to the 5th century BC likewise indicate that the pre-Hesiodic myth of the goddess Pandora endured for centuries after the time of Hesiod. An alternate name for Pandora attested on a white-ground kylix (ca. 460 BC) is Anesidora, which similarly means "she who sends up gifts." This vase painting clearly depicts Hephaestus and Athena putting the finishing touches on the first woman, as in the Theogony. Written above this figure (a convention in Greek vase painting) is the name Anesidora. More commonly, however, the epithet anesidora is applied to Gaea or Demeter.
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 mankind. 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
Eve in the Book of Genesis and Pandora in the Works and Days have some striking similarities. Each is the first woman in the world; and each is a central character in a story of transition from an original state of plenty and ease to one of suffering and death, a transition which is brought about in revenge for a transgression of divine law. Both Eve and Pandora were given only one "divine prohibition" in their otherwise idyllic lives, and both found themselves irresistibly drawn to "violate" their one prohibition, thus risking/ inviting dire and profound consequences for all.
There are also major differences. Eve was created to help Adam, Pandora to bring punishment to the men who benefited from the crime (Prometheus having been punished separately).
Some believe that in the centuries following the conquest of western Asia by Alexander the Great, each story was retold to more closely resemble the other. In 1 Timothy, Eve alone appears to be labelled a transgressor. In Pandora by Bishop Jean Oliver, Pandora is said to "open the box in defiance of a divine injunction".
Pandora in modern media
Certain media platforms (such as music, television, and comic books) have referenced and re-imagined Pandora (still pointing towards the Greek Mythology) to maintain her relevance in current times. For example, when Pandora Music launched in 2000, they mention her relevance to their branding, "The name Pandora means 'all gifted' in Greek. In ancient Greek mythology, Pandora received many gifts from the gods, including the gift of music, from Apollo. She was also, as we all know, very curious. Unlike those gods of old, however, we celebrate that virtue and have made it our mission to reward the musically curious among us with a never-ending experience of music discovery."
In August 2010, DC Comics released Wonder Woman [second series] issue #45 Pandora's Box introducing Pandora in a back story that involves how Diana Prince and Pandora are connected to the fate of the Amazons. Then in October 2011, DC released Flashpoint issue #5 which included a modern-day version of a nameless character that had special abilities such as immortality, magic, supernatural knowledge, and combat skills. It wasn't until January 2012 (by Bob Harris posted on the DC Comics blog site) fans learned the truth "Her name is Pandora." It wasn't until August 2013 that DC Comics released Justice League Trinity War issue 11, a comic book story arc which picks up from Pandora's point of view on her cursed crusade to destroy the seven deadly sins. Her series arch lasted 14 issues and her fate is still open for further story development.
Notes
References
- Athanassakis, A. Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Shield (New York 1983).
- Beall, E. "The Contents of Hesiod's Pandora Jar: Erga 94-98," Hermes 117 (1989) 227-30.
- Harrison, Jane Ellen, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) 1922, pp. 280-85.
- Griffith, Mark. Aeschylus Prometheus Bound Text and Commentary (Cambridge 1983).
- Hesiod; Works and Days, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Cambridge, MA.,Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
- Hesiod, Works and Days, ed. with prolegomena and commentary (Oxford 1978).
- Hesiod, Theogony, and Works and Days (Oxford 1988).
- Homer, The Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
- Patrick Kaplanian, Mythes grecs d'Origine, volume I, Prométhée et Pandore, Ed. L'entreligne, Paris 2011, distribution Daudin
- Kenaan, Pandora's Senses: The Feminine Character of the Ancient Text (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), pp. xii, 253 (Wisconsin Studies in Classics).
- Kirk, G.S., Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley 1970) 226-32.
- Lamberton, Robert, Hesiod, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. ISBN 0-300-04068-7. Cf. Chapter II, "The Theogony", and Chapter III, "The Works and Days", especially pp. 96-103 for a side-by-side comparison and analysis of the Pandora story.
- Leinieks, V. "Elpis in Hesiod, Works and Days 96," Philologus 128 (1984) 1-8.
- Meagher, Robert E.; The Meaning of Helen: in Search of an Ancient Icon, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1995. ISBN 978-0-86516-510-6.
- Moore, Clifford H. The Religious Thought of the Greeks, 1916.
- Neils, Jenifer, The Girl in the Pithos: Hesiod's Elpis, in "Periklean Athens and its Legacy. Problems and Perspectives", eds. J. M. Barringer and J. M. Hurwit (Austin : University of Texas Press), 2005, pp. 37-45.
- Nilsson, Martin P. History of Greek Religion, 1949.
- Phipps, William E., Eve and Pandora Contrasted, in Theology Today, v.45, n.1, April 1988, Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary.
- Pucci, Pietro, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore 1977)
- Rose, Herbert Jennings, A Handbook of Greek Literature; From Homer to the Age of Lucian, London, Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1934. Cf. especially Chapter III, Hesiod and the Hesiodic Schools, p. 61
- Schlegel, Catherine and Henry Weinfield, "Introduction to Hesiod" in Hesiod / Theogony and Works and Days, University of Michigan Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-472-06932-3.
- Smith, William; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). "Pando'ra"
- Smith, William; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). "Anesido'ra"
- Verdenius, Willem Jacob, A Commentary on Hesiod Works and Days vv 1-382 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985). ISBN 90-04-07465-1. This work has a very in-depth discussion and synthesis of the various theories and speculations about the Pandora story and the jar. Cf. p. 62 and onwards.
- Vernant, J. P., Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (New York 1990) 183-201.
- Vernant, J. P. « Le mythe prométhéen chez Hésiode », in Mythe et société en Grèce ancienne, Paris, Maspéro, 1974, pp. 177-194
- Warner, M., Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York 1985) 213-40
- West, M. L., Hesiod, Theogony, ed. with prolegomena and commentary (Oxford 1966).
- West, M. L., Hesiod, Works and Days, ed. with prolegomena and commentary (Oxford 1978).
- Zarecki, Jonathan P., "Pandora and the Good Eris in Hesiod", Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007) 5-29
- Zeitlin, Froma. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Princeton 1995).
External links
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Pandora". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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