Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(2)

Every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards. Myths may be the home of the miraculous, but they are also mirrors of us. Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth. We have made space in our storytelling to rediscover women who have been lost or forgotten. They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people.





Pandora




WHEN WE THINK OF PANDORA, WE PROBABLY HAVE A PICTURE in our minds. She holds a box in her hands, or she’s sitting beside one. She is opening it either because she is curious to see what’s inside, or because she knows what it contains and wants to let it out. Its contents are abstract but terrible: all the evils in the world are now set loose upon us. And, gratifyingly, we know exactly who to blame: the beautiful woman who couldn’t leave well alone.

It’s obviously a story which finds its echoes with Eve. Do what you like in Eden, Adam is told by God. Eat from any of the trees. Except that one, the tree of knowledge, which is nonetheless placed in easy reach, next to this persuasive talking snake. Eve is then created, but God doesn’t tell her what she can and can’t eat. She has presumably heard it from Adam, though, because she knows what to say when the snake (whom God has also created) asks her if she can’t eat from any of the trees in the garden. Yes, Eve replies, we can. Just not that one or we’ll die. The knowledge tree? asks the snake. No, you won’t die. You’ll just be able to tell good from evil, like God. Eve shares the fruit with Adam, who was with her, as the book of Genesis tells us. And the snake is right: they don’t die, though Eve is promised agonizing childbirth as her reward for heeding the snake for whose existence and voice God was entirely responsible.

But Pandora has been particularly ill-served by history, even relative to Eve. Eve did at least listen to the snake and eat the thing she’d been told was dangerous. Pandora did not open a box, either from curiosity or malevolence. Indeed the box doesn’t appear in her story until Hesiod’s Works and Days was translated into Latin by Erasmus, in the sixteenth century, well over two millennia after Hesiod was writing in Greek. Erasmus was looking for a word to convey the Greek pithos, meaning ‘jar’. As the classical scholar and translator M. L. West describes,1 Hesiod meant a ceramic storage jar, a metre or so tall. Greek jars are narrow at the base, broadening out to a wide lip. They are not especially stable: look in any museum of classical antiquities and you will see the many cracks and repairs which reveal their intrinsic fragility. Ceramic pots are often beautiful, ornately decorated works of art. But they are not where one would necessarily choose to store a set of evils that will cause mankind untold griefs for millennia to come. Quite aside from anything else – as anyone who has ever swept a kitchen floor will cheerlessly testify – lids aren’t always tightly fastened. And we have the advantage of screw-tops, something Pandora assuredly did not.

West conjectures that Erasmus confused the stories of Pandora and Psyche (another character from Greek myth who does carry a box – puxos, more usually transliterated as pyxis – when she is sent to the Underworld on a quest). It’s certainly a plausible theory. So did Erasmus confuse the two women – Pandora and Psyche – or confuse the two similar-sounding words: jar – pithos, and box – puxos (in Greek; pyxis in Latin)? Either way, the loser is Pandora. Because, while it might take effort to open a box, it’s much easier to knock a lid off or smash a top-heavy ceramic jar. And yet the linguistically doctored image of Pandora opening a box with malice aforethought is the one which has entered our culture.

Look at artistic representations of her which pre-date the widespread reading of Erasmus (who died in 1536) and she is shown with a jar, even if the painter is seeking to cast her as a villain and the image reflects that. Jean Cousin painted her as Eva Prima Pandora,2 a blend of Pandora and Eve, around 1550: lying naked, save for a sheet curled between her legs, jar under one hand, human skull under the other. And there are later paintings which also show her with a jar: Henry Howard’s The Opening of Pandora’s Vase3 in 1834, for example. But the most famous image of her is perhaps from some forty years later, by which time Erasmus’ rewrite seems firmly embedded in the collective artistic consciousness.

In 1871, Rossetti completed his portrait of Pandora holding a small golden casket in her hands. The lid of the casket is studded with large jewels, green and purple, which are echoed by the ornate stones in one of the bracelets she wears on her right wrist. The long, slender fingers of her right hand are flexed as she begins to open the box. Her left hand grips the base firmly. The crack opening between the lid and the box itself is just a thin shadow, but already a coil of orange smoke emanates: it is twisting its way behind Pandora’s red-brown curls. We don’t know what is in the box exactly, but whatever it is, it’s sinister. Look at the side of the box more closely, just above Pandora’s left thumb, and a Latin inscription makes things appear less promising still: ‘Nascitur Ignescitur’4 – born in flames. Rossetti made the casket himself, but it has subsequently been lost.

The portrait is well over a metre tall, and its depth of colour is as fiery as the text at its centre: Pandora wears a crimson dress, which drapes over her arms and body from its high round neckline. Her lips are painted in a perfect bow in the same bright red. A tiny shadow under the centre of her mouth creates the impression that her lower lip protrudes towards the viewer. Her huge blue eyes gaze unapologetically at us. The model was Jane Morris, wife of the artist William, with whom Rossetti had been having what we can reasonably conclude was a thrilling affair. Critics asked themselves what William Morris might think of a work showing his wife in such an undeniably erotic light, painted by another man. Fewer people thought to ask how Jane Morris must have felt to see herself illustrating the description of Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony as kalon kakon5 – a beautiful evil. And no one asked what Pandora might have thought of the object she was holding so tightly, so dangerously in her beautiful hands.