Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(4)

The gods rush to do Zeus’ bidding. Indeed, more gods get involved: the Graces, Persuasion and the Hours all help with golden and floral decorations. The god Hermes gives her a doglike mind (this isn’t a compliment: the Greeks didn’t love dogs in the way that we do) and a dishonest nature. He is also responsible for both her voice and her name: ‘he called the woman Pandora, because all the gods who live on Mount Olympus gave her a gift, a calamity to men.’10 It is also Hermes, as the messenger of the gods, who takes Pandora away from the immortal realm and delivers her to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, as a gift. Prometheus (whose name literally means ‘foresight’) had warned his brother not to accept any gifts from Zeus. Epimetheus’ name means ‘hindsight’, and perhaps this is why he forgets that a present from Zeus might be something other than a box tied up with ribbon. So Epimetheus receives Pandora and the carefree life of mortals is at an end. Before this point, Hesiod explains, men had lived on the earth free from evils, free from hard work and from disease. But once Pandora takes the huge lid off her jar, that is all over, and mournful cares are now spread among mortals. Only Hope (Elpis)11 remains inside, retained under the lip of the jar, her unbroken home.

This longer version of Pandora’s beginnings answers some questions and raises several more. Pandora is a gift – literally: she is given by Hermes to Epimetheus. She is also all-gifted, insofar as many gods have contributed to her creation, giving her different qualities and skills. This part of her story perhaps reminds us of Sleeping Beauty, in which a baby is granted various positive qualities by invited fairies before a malevolent gatecrasher throws a spanner in the works by gifting her the prospect of death by spindle (commuted to an enormously long nap). But Pandora isn’t a baby when she receives these gifts, she is a parthenos: a maiden, a young woman of marriageable age. So these are not future qualities being bestowed on her, but immediately visible, audible ones: a voice, a dress, skill at weaving. There is a temptation to read her name as meaning ‘all-gifted’ (pan – ‘all’, dora comes from the verb didomi – ‘I give’). But the verb in Pandora’s name is active, not passive: literally she is all-giving rather than all-gifted. As an adjective in Greek, pandora is usually used to describe the earth, the all-giving thing which sustains life. There is an Athenian kylix (a wine cup) from around 460 BCE, attributed to the Tarquinia Painter, which is now in the British Museum and which appears to depict the scene Hesiod describes. The figures of Athene and Hephaestus stand to either side of a stiff Pandora, still seemingly more clay than woman. She is becoming a parthenos, but she is not yet finished, like a doll being dressed up by the skilful hands of the gods. Her name on this pot is given as Anesidora, meaning ‘she who sends up gifts’, much as the earth sends up the shoots of plants which will feed us and our livestock. So Pandora’s intrinsic generosity is erased if we think of her only as gifted.

But is she all-giving of anything we actually want? Or does she just dole out the contents of her jar? Hard work, grievous cares, disease and the like? In which case her name might best be read ironically: thanks for all the trauma you’re gifting us. It’s curious that Hesiod goes to such lengths to describe the creation of Pandora (right down to the spring flowers put in her hair), but the first we hear about the massive jar she is carrying is when she takes the lid off it after she is sent to Epimetheus. It’s hard to imagine she’s picked it up somewhere on her way down from Olympus with Hermes. Rather, it seems that Zeus’ punishment for men is twofold: the cunning, unavoidable Pandora herself, and the jar of nasties which he sends with her. After all, he is punishing a two-pronged attack on his divine dignity (the trick Prometheus pulled with the sacrificial meat and the theft of fire), so a double revenge seems appropriate. In which case, again, we might begin to wonder why Pandora receives all the blame. Look at the number of gods and Titans involved in this myth: Prometheus antagonizes Zeus but does give us fire and tries his best to warn Epimetheus about possible retribution. Epimetheus simply ignores or forgets what his brother had warned him about accepting gifts from Zeus, so we can surely lay some of the blame at his door. If he’d been more astute, Pandora would have been sent packing, jar and all, back to Olympus. Or do we give Epimetheus a pass because Zeus is after all the most powerful Olympian god and there isn’t much a Titan can do in a battle of wits with him, especially if he’s employing all the other gods to help him create and deliver Pandora? But then, why don’t we extend the same courtesy to Pandora? She is the mechanism by which Zeus decides to take his revenge, so how much agency does she really have? Stand up to Zeus and your best-case scenario is being struck by lightning and obliterated. Worst-case scenario is having your liver pecked out every day for eternity. It is hard to shake the sense that Hesiod has two pet peeves – conniving women and hapless brothers – and has told us this story in such a way that it contains one of each. But do we really think Pandora should have declined to accompany Hermes, or sat on top of her jar and refused to budge so it couldn’t be opened? Does she even know what’s inside? Hesiod is keen to tell us of her treacherous, deceitful nature (implanted by Hermes), but we see no indication of that. And, incidentally, Hermes seems to walk away from the whole saga without carrying any blame either.

Hesiod raises one last conundrum when he tells us that Elpis – Hope – remains beneath the lip of the jar. Is this a good thing for mortal men, or a bad one? Do we think Hope is being saved for us inside the jar? Or is it being withheld from us? All the evils which were inside are now out in the world, so would we be in better shape if Hope travelled among them? At least then we might have some positivity to raise our spirits (obviously, this doesn’t work if, like John Cleese in Clockwise, we ‘can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand’). Is Pandora committing one more act of petulant cruelty by making our lives miserable and then depriving us even of Hope? Or is the jar a safe place, where we know we will always have Hope, as we traverse a world which is now so much more frightening than it was before the jar was opened? Scholars have been divided on their reading of this passage, not least because, although elpis is usually translated as ‘hope’, it doesn’t quite mean that. Hope is intrinsically positive in English, but in Greek (and the same with the Latin equivalent, spes) it is not. Since it really means the anticipation of something good or bad, a more accurate translation would probably be ‘expectation’. Before we can worry about whether it’s advantageous to us that it remains in the jar, we first have to decide if it is intrinsically good or bad. This is a genuinely complex linguistic and philosophical puzzle. No wonder it’s easier to just blame Pandora.