Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(6)

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Visual artists have often been inspired by Pandora, perhaps because she provides them with an opportunity to share the intensity of an affair with their entire social circle (in the case of Rossetti) or the chance to paint an attractive woman mostly or completely naked (in the case of Jean Cousin, Jules Lefebvre, Paul Césaire Gariot, William Etty, John William Waterhouse and many more). Perhaps they didn’t consult Hesiod to remind themselves about the silvery robe she delights in. These artists tend to show her in the act of opening either a jar or a box, or being about to do so, or in the immediate aftermath of having done so. Their focus is almost always on the destruction which Pandora has wreaked or will imminently wreak, which is surely a consequence of the mingling of the Pandora and Eve narratives. The emphasis in Pandora’s story for centuries has been her single-handed role in the fall of man. Just as Adam and the snake dodge so much of the blame in Eve’s story, so Zeus, Hermes and Epimetheus have been exonerated in almost every later version of Pandora’s. The guiding principle when searching for the cause of everything wrong in the world has been, all too often: cherchez la femme.

The ancient Greeks also liked to create visual representations of Pandora, but they were much less interested in the opening of the jar, perhaps because the jar simply wasn’t that important to them (as we’ve seen, Hesiod only mentions it in his second version of her story). Or perhaps because competing traditions (as we’ve seen in Aesop) change the identity of the jar-opener and the contents of the jar. Ancient sculptors and painters instead focus their attention on the moment when the gods all come together to contribute to the creation of all-gifted, all-giving Pandora. This is the scene which appears on some of the finest kraters (mixing bowls for the Greeks to add water to their wine) which depict Pandora, such as the one at the British Museum,16 and one at the Ashmolean17 in Oxford. Interestingly, the association of Pandora with a box is so complete that the Ashmolean website lists their krater under the heading ‘Pandora’s Box’. But there is no sign of either the anachronistic box nor even the jar anywhere in the scene, which instead depicts Zeus looking on and Hermes looking back at him, before Epimetheus – armed with a hammer to help sculpt Pandora from the clay – offers a hand to Pandora as she rises out of the ground. Eros hovers above them, presumably to make sure that the couple fall swiftly in love.

It is this scene which was given pride of place on the Parthenon, in Athens. The focal point of this huge temple was its vast sculpture of Athene Parthenos, the patron goddess of the Athenians. The statue stood over ten metres tall, and was made of over a ton of ivory and gold plates (the Greek word for this combination is chryselephantine) attached to a wooden core.18 This Athene is long gone, but we have writings from ancient authors who had seen both the statue and – crucially for our understanding of how the Greeks themselves viewed Pandora – its sculpted base. This would have been roughly at eye-height for visitors to the cella – the inner room of the temple. The base showed the creation of Pandora in sculpted relief. Obviously, it would have been dwarfed by the colossal statue of Athene. But Pandora’s inclusion on the focal statue in this sacred building tells us something about how the Athenians thought of her. Athene was crucial to Pandora’s creation, after all, giving her a dress and her weaving skills (this is no minor skill in ancient Greece. Rather, weaving was a task which was considered the ideal pursuit for virtuous women. That’s why Penelope is weaving and unweaving a shroud for much of the Odyssey). Pausanias – the second-century CE travel writer – mentions their connection when he describes the Parthenon for his readers. The statue of Athene stands upright, he says, and there is a Medusa carved from ivory on her breast. On the pedestal is the birth of Pandora who was, as has been sung about by Hesiod and others, the first woman. Before her, Pausanias reiterates, there was no womankind.19 Again, no mention of any jar or its contents. It seems reasonable to suggest that, for the ancients, Pandora’s role as the ancestor of all women was far more important than her disputed role in opening the world to incessant evil. Even if, for Hesiod, these two amount to much the same thing.

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The relief from the Parthenon isn’t the only missing piece of evidence about Pandora from fifth-century BCE Athens. We have also lost a play by Sophocles called Pandora, or Sphyrokopoi, which means ‘The Hammerers’. We usually think of Sophocles as a tragedian, because his seven surviving plays are tragedies. But in fact he wrote perhaps as many as 150 plays in his lifetime, including satyr-plays, of which The Hammerers is one. Satyr-plays were performed after tragedies, and were full of absurdity, silly jokes, and a chorus of satyrs. Sophocles would have produced three tragedies and a satyr-play each time he was entered into the Dionysia, the drama festival in Athens (held in honour of Dionysus, the god of theatre and wine) where his plays were first performed. We don’t have a complete set of any of Sophocles’ plays: the Theban plays – Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone – are often performed or published together, but they come from three separate trilogies. And we have extensive fragments from only one of his satyr-plays, The Trackers (although Tony Harrison filled in the gaps with his brilliant play The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus). There is an almost palpable shock in finding Sophocles – the most devastating of poets, in many ways – made jokes. So it is disappointing on at least two counts that we know almost nothing about his version of the Pandora myth. We can guess, from the alternative title, The Hammerers, that it focused on Pandora’s creation, as the fifth-century BCE Greek sculptors and vase painters did. It seems plausible to assume that the satyrs carried hammers, since these plays usually take their titles from the role played by the chorus of satyrs (half animal, half man, and always with a massive erection. Not all cultural traditions survive intact, but satyr-plays are probably closest to burlesque, if burlesque had more permanently priapic man–horse hybrids singing and dancing in it. Doubtless this niche is being catered for somewhere). The hammers will be employed, as Epimetheus’ hammer is about to be used on the krater displayed in the Ashmolean, to prepare the clay from which Pandora will be sculpted, or perhaps to free her from the ground (from which she is rising on the Ashmolean pot). If only we had more information about the play, or some fragments of it survived, we might infer more about how fifth-century BCE Athenians saw Pandora and whether they considered her particularly relevant to their city-state, as her inclusion in the Parthenon implies. Sadly, we know nothing definite.