Pandora’s Boxes

This has bothered me practically my whole life, since I first read the D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths. Pandora is given a box, right? And in it is every evil in the world, right? And she opens the box and releases every evil, right? Except she slams the lid down right at the end, so that Hope doesn’t escape, as everyone knows.

So what the heck is Hope doing in a box of all the evil in the world? And how does keeping it in a jar help?

Turns out the biblical editors weren’t the only ones combining stories and leaving weird incongruities.

The earliest and best known version of the Pandora story is from Hesiod’s Works and Days, a long poem from around the eighth century BCE (lines 42ff.). In that poem, the story is a sequel to Prometheus stealing fire. As you might recall, Zeus wants fire only for the gods, but Prometheus, who created humans, feels sorry for them and steals it from heaven. Hesiod says that as a result, humans could work for one day and eat for a year—practically the Land of Cockaigne or the Big Rock Candy Mountain (same thing). But Zeus is not letting mortals off that easy.

He has the gods cooperate to create Pandora, the Woman Who Is All Gifts. They send her to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother, who forgets his brother’s warning not to accept any gifts from Zeus and lets Pandora pass on to the mortal world. Pandora then opens a jar (not a box, which would be harder to make airtight), releasing all the evils in the world, except Hope.

The D’Aulaires’ version added the motif of curiosity: Pandora was infected with insatiable curiosity by the gods, so that, though she was told not to open the jar, she did so anyway. That is missing from Hesiod’s version. For Hesiod, she just opens the jar the second she gets to earth. What’s more, the jar is completely unmentioned in the story of the gods creating Pandora. It just appears in her hands when the story requires it.

We’ve encountered this sort of thing before in the Bible. And here too, it might be a feature of Hesiod’s storytelling. Maybe he forgot to mention it, or maybe it wasn’t important to him at that point. Stories are weird sometimes. If only there were other versions to compare.

In fact, there are two. Hesiod himself provides one in another poem, Theogony (lines 570ff.), but it’s easy to miss for a simple reason: Hesiod doesn’t name Pandora in that version. The story in Theogony is clearly parallel to the story in Works and Days. Both occur as a response to Prometheus’s theft of fire. Both involve the creation of a woman by all the Olympian gods. But this time there’s no jar. The woman herself is the false gift, the gift of Woman to an all-male humanity—understood by our deeply misogynistic author as a punishment in and of itself, “a great plague to mortals” (line 592, translation Stephanie Nelson, here and below). Here, the woman doesn’t need a jar to release a plague.

There are echoes of this version of the story in Works and Days, when Hermes gives Pandora “the mind of a bitch and the heart of a thief”, rather than some desirable quality, as would suit the motif of Epimetheus letting Pandora pass. Now the image of the jar begins to look extraneous, like it came from somewhere else. As it turns out, it did.

In a collection of Aesop’s fables edited and translated by Laura Gibbs, we find two fables that shed light on Pandora. Fable 525 (by Gibbs’s numbering) tells us that bad things so outnumber good things on earth because the bad things chased the good things back to heaven, so that good things can only sneak down one at a time. As an answer to the problem of evil, it’s interesting, indeed almost secular, but for our purposes what’s most important is that to the imagination of this writer, good things fly away from earth because of a natural process. This is important when we consider Fable 526.

Here, Zeus sends down a sealed jar full of good things, not evil things. Here, we do have the motif of curiosity, without the misogyny: “man had no self-control and he wanted to know what was in that jar, so he pushed the lid aside, letting those things go back to the abode of the gods.” “Man” slams the lid back on, once again trapping Hope, but here it is clear that Hope is a good thing, not an evil thing, and that its being caught in the jar is precisely what makes it available to mortals.

Hesiod has integrated the originally independent story of the forbidden jar in one of his versions of the Pandora myth, where it has been recolored by the motif of divine vengeance and transformed into a jar of evil things, in which Hope, incongruously, is also found. As an individual canonical text, Hesiod’s Works and Days version of Pandora has weird, irreconcilable features. Understood as part of a larger cultural process of storytelling, it’s completely comprehensible. We’ve found the same thing in the Hebrew Bible: individual stories have contradictions that doom the attempt to read them all on the same level, in the same way, but understood as a larger, flexible storytelling process, they make perfect sense.