Pandora did not open a box. The object in the original Greek tradition is a pithos, a large storage jar of the kind used to store grain, wine, and olive oil throughout the ancient Greek world. The mistranslation to box originated with Erasmus of Rotterdam in the sixteenth century, who rendered the Greek pithos as the Latin pyxis, meaning box, when translating Hesiod, and the mistranslation has been with us ever since. The box is a Renaissance error. The story is considerably older.
What Pandora released from the jar was not simply a collection of evils sent to punish humanity. It was the full range of human misfortune: disease, labour, old age, death, and all the hardships that distinguish human life from divine life. And at the bottom of the jar, when everything else had escaped, was Elpis: hope. The tradition is specific that hope remained inside. It did not escape with the rest. Whether that is a gift or a curse is a question that has occupied readers of Hesiod for two and a half thousand years.
Prometheus, Zeus, and the Context
The Pandora myth cannot be understood without its context, which is the conflict between Prometheus and Zeus over humanity. Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, and Zeus’s response was twofold: he chained Prometheus to a rock and had an eagle eat his liver daily, regenerating each night for the eagle to eat again, and he sent Pandora to humanity as a punishment.
Hesiod’s Works and Days, the primary source for the Pandora myth, presents this sequence with considerable bitterness about the human condition. Before Pandora, in Hesiod’s account, humans lived without labour, without disease, without death, in a golden age where the earth produced food without effort and life was good. Pandora ends all of this. She is the mechanism through which the golden age becomes the difficult present in which Hesiod and his readers actually live.
Pandora’s Creation
Zeus commissioned Hephaestus to create Pandora from earth and water, making her in the image of the immortal goddesses. Each of the Olympians then contributed a gift: Athena taught her weaving and clothed her. Aphrodite poured grace and painful desire and limb-weakening longing over her. Hermes gave her a deceitful nature and the capacity for thieving ways and flattery. The Graces and the Seasons decked her with garlands of flowers and gold.
The name Pandora means all-gifted or all-giving, and the list of gifts she received encodes an ambivalence about what being all-gifted actually means: beauty, skill, and grace alongside deceit, desire that weakens the judgment, and flattery. She is made to be desirable and she is made to be dangerous, and the two are not separable in how she is constructed.
Hermes brought her to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus. Prometheus had warned his brother never to accept gifts from Zeus. Epimetheus forgot, or chose not to remember, and accepted Pandora. She was, after all, extraordinarily beautiful. He married her.
The Jar and What Escaped
Hesiod does not explain how Pandora came to open the jar, or precisely what jar it was, or where it came from. He simply states that she removed the great lid of the jar and scattered its contents, and that only Elpis remained inside under the rim because she replaced the lid before Elpis could escape. Everything else flew out: countless plagues and miseries that range among humans by night as well as day and bring harm silently, because Zeus took away their voice.
The list of what escaped is not specified in detail by Hesiod. Disease, labour, and death are the most commonly cited, along with madness, vice, and old age in various later elaborations. What the myth is describing is the transition from the mythological golden age, in which humans did not have to contend with these things, to the world as it actually is, in which they do. Pandora is not the cause of evil in any absolute sense. She is the mechanism through which the conditions of ordinary human life were introduced.
Why Hope Stayed
Elpis, the word usually translated as hope, remaining inside the jar is the most discussed element of the Pandora myth, and the discussion has not reached a settled conclusion because the tradition is genuinely ambiguous about what it means.
If hope is a good thing, its remaining inside the jar is a gift: humanity retains hope even as all other goods escape, which is either consolation or the one resource that makes the difficult present survivable. This is the most common popular reading of the myth and the one that produces the phrase hope remained at the bottom of the box as a positive observation.
If hope is ambiguous, the reading changes. Hesiod’s Elpis is not straightforwardly positive in the wider tradition. Hope in the Greek sense is not certainty. It is the state of believing that things might be better than they are, which is useful when they might be but harmful when they certainly will not. A person who hopes for the impossible is not better off for hoping. The tradition also uses Elpis in negative contexts: the hope of the wicked, the foolish hope that leads to destruction.
Some scholars have argued that hope remaining inside the jar is not a gift but a further punishment: humanity is left with the capacity for hope, which means the capacity for delusion about the future, which means the capacity to suffer disappointment in addition to all the actual miseries that escaped. On this reading, Pandora’s jar contains all the miseries of human life plus the mechanism by which humans torture themselves with expectations that those miseries will not materialise.
Hesiod does not resolve this. He states that Elpis remained inside the jar, notes that this is what Zeus wanted, and moves on. The tradition preserves the ambiguity rather than explaining it, which is characteristic of how Greek mythology handles its deepest questions.
Pandora and Eve
The comparison between Pandora and Eve is one that readers have drawn since antiquity, and it is worth addressing directly. Both are the first women in their respective traditions. Both are connected to an act that introduces hardship into a previously good world. Both are in some way responsible for the difficult conditions in which humans actually live.
The comparison is real but should not be overstated. Pandora is not acting against a divine prohibition when she opens the jar, or if she is, the prohibition is not stated in Hesiod. She is not tempted by an external figure. She is doing what she was made to do, because she was made by Zeus to be the punishment for humanity’s receipt of fire. Her opening of the jar is not disobedience but fulfilment of her created purpose.
Eve in the Genesis tradition chooses to eat the fruit against a specific instruction. Pandora opens a jar in the tradition’s most complete account without a prohibition being specified. The moral weight of the two acts is different in the texts themselves even if the structural position of the two figures in their respective traditions is similar.
Further Reading
If this article sparked your interest, these are the books worth reading next.
The Iliad — Homer (Penguin Classics)
by Homer — the primary source for everything in this article, and still the most vivid account of the Trojan War ever written.
The Odyssey — Homer (Emily Wilson translation)
by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson — the best modern English translation, and the book that contains Odysseus’s own account of the horse.
The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction
by Eric Cline — the clearest and most up to date account of what archaeology actually tells us about Troy and whether any of it happened.
For more on the Greek tradition, the Prometheus article covers the Titan whose theft of fire created the conditions for Pandora’s creation and whose punishment by Zeus is one of the most politically significant myths in the tradition. The Zeus article covers the god who commissioned Pandora as a punishment and whose intentions the ambiguity around Elpis reflects. The Greek Mythology hub page has every article in the cluster.
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