Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(7)

But as informed guesses go, it seems reasonable to suggest that the Athenians included the relief of Pandora in their temple because she was the Ur-woman, the woman from whom all women are descended. The Athenians’ attitude to women is hard for us to understand today. The polis – the city-state and all the democratic institutions which contributed to it – was a male-only enclave. Only men could vote, or serve on juries, or take part in Athenian civic life at all. Women were more or less cloistered (depending on class, and money) and might go for long periods of time without even speaking to men to whom they were not closely related. The Athenian ideal, espoused in Pericles’ funeral oration20 in 431 BCE, was that women should aspire never to be talked about, either in terms of blame or praise. The greatest virtue, in other words, that an Athenian woman could aspire to was not to be registered, almost not to exist. It is a gratifying quirk of Pericles’ character that he could make this speech while living with the most famous (or perhaps notorious) woman in Athens, one mentioned by everyone from comedians to philosophers: Aspasia. Thankfully the hypocrisy of censuring women’s behaviour in general while maintaining an entirely different set of standards for the actual women you know has now died out.

Even Greek grammar obliterated women. When Athenian men referred to a group of themselves, they would use the words hoi Athenaioi – ‘the Athenian men’ (the endings of both words are masculine). If a mixed-sex group of Athenians gathered, the phrase used to describe them would be exactly the same – if even one man was present among dozens of women, the word-ending used to describe the group is masculine: –oi. For an all-female group of Athenians, the words would be hai Athenaiai. I say ‘would be’ because that phrase is not found anywhere in extant Greek literature:21 no one ever needs to refer to a group of Athenian women, because they aren’t important.

And yet there is Pandora, at eye-height, in the Parthenon, the grandest structure in the grandest city in fifth-century BCE Greece. A temple, and its decorative sculptures of epic battles and religious processions, built for the sole purpose of reflecting and aggrandizing Athenian identity. For all the harsh words about women which we find in the writings of Hesiod or the virtual non-existence required of them in the speech of Pericles (at least as told to us by the historian Thucydides), there is an argument to be made that women were not quite as invisible as we might have thought.

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Perhaps it’s not surprising that Pandora’s role as our ancestor has been largely forgotten today. Instead, her Old Testament semi-equivalent has taken precedence in our collective consciousness. Just as Deucalion (the survivor of the Great Flood in Greek myth) has been largely forgotten while Noah and his ark sail cheerily to salvation, so Pandora has been approximated or replaced by Eve. But why has the box she never carried exerted such a fascination on so many artists and writers? ‘Pandora’s box’ is an idiom, a shorthand in a way that ‘Eve’s apple’ never has been. And no usage of it is ever positive, as in the Aesop version where the box is full of treats which we have inadvertently let slip through our careless hands. At best, we might use it to imply that a set of unforeseen consequences has now come into play. But more usually, when someone opens Pandora’s box, it is both negative and somewhat worse than might have been anticipated, or on a much larger and more damaging scale. Like opening a can of worms and finding it to be full of poisonous snakes instead.

It’s surely not enough to blame the whole thing on Erasmus. Countless translators have made countless errors in texts through the ages, and most of them have had nothing like the resonance or impact that Erasmus’ mix-up of pithos and pyxis has had. But somehow, he coined an idea which has echoed through the centuries. Everything used to be okay, but then a single, irreversible bad decision was made, and now we all live with the consequences forever. It’s reassuring in a way: the problem was caused long before we were born and will persist long after our deaths, so there’s nothing we can really do about it. In the immortal words of Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, it’s beyond my control. It allows us to be children again: injustice, cruelty and disease are all someone else’s fault, so it isn’t our problem to try and fix them.

And then there is the question of motive, which is missing entirely from the ancient Greek version of Pandora. Even Hesiod doesn’t give us a reason for Pandora opening the jar and letting all the evils out into the world. She just does it. We don’t know if it comes from curiosity or malice, we don’t even know if Pandora realizes what’s inside the jar. We don’t know where it came from or how Pandora acquired it. Unlike Eve, who at least gets a line or two of dialogue to explain herself, Pandora is (for all that she has been given a voice by Hermes) mute. Whatever motives we attribute to her are ours, and ours alone.

But once the jar has become a box, and particularly once the box shrinks from a huge pithos to become a small, portable pyxis, the element of compulsion is undeniable. Is there something in us which is drawn to doing the forbidden? Of course, or the story of Adam and Eve getting themselves booted out of the Garden of Eden wouldn’t resonate as it does. They have everything they could possibly want, and all they have to do to continue their paradisal existence is obey a single (arbitrary, snake-undermined) rule. But the lure of the prohibited is undeniable. If a phrase has come out of the Eve story to rival ‘Pandora’s box’, it is perhaps ‘forbidden fruit’. It is not that the delicious fruit happens to be forbidden. It is that the fruit is delicious precisely because it is forbidden. The act of prohibition makes the withheld item more alluring than it could ever otherwise have been.