Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(9)

The strange, compelling and unpredictable nature of Pandora’s box has inspired musicians as well as artists and film-makers. Love to Love You Baby, Donna Summer’s 1975 album, contains easily the best song with the title ‘Pandora’s Box’. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released a different song with the same title in 1991, with a music video full of clips of Louise Brooks in the 1929 silent film Pandora’s Box. Pandora isn’t mentioned by name in the song (though it does reference a ‘dangerous creation’, which could easily be read as Hesiodic by the enthusiastic classicist). In the same year, Aerosmith also released a compilation album, Pandora’s Box, whose title track dates back to 1974. One interview suggests a theme of women’s liberation inspired the lyrics, but, to the untrained ear, it sounds a lot like Steven Tyler has the hots for a woman named Pandora, whose box is euphemistic rather than metaphorical. Though perhaps I am being unfair, and there simply isn’t anything which rhymes with ‘proud’, other than ‘well-endowed’.

Even when it isn’t explicitly named as an instance of Pandora’s box, we know the trope when we hear or see it. In 1994, cinema-goers flocked to Quentin Tarantino’s cult hit Pulp Fiction. It grossed more than $200 million, which is unusual for a film which also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The film has many iconic moments, not least of which is the briefcase which acts as a MacGuffin: we never know why the characters want it, but our desire to know what it contains is only heightened by other people’s responses to it. It is valued so highly by characters we believe in that we in turn believe it must be valuable. Yet we never find out why. We only know, as with Kiss Me Deadly, that when the box is opened, it contains something which emits light. Fans have speculated on what this might be, but the film never tells us and nor has its writer-director. In 1995, Samuel L. Jackson told Playboy magazine that he had asked Tarantino what the case might contain, only to receive the reply: ‘Whatever you want it to be.’22

And that, surely, is the real secret hidden inside Pandora’s jar. It’s also an excellent description of Pandora herself. Earlier in this chapter, I quoted the oxymoronic description of her in Hesiod’s Theogony: kalon kakon23 – ‘a beautiful evil’ – which Zeus gives to mortals as a penalty for the fire that Prometheus had stolen for us. The phrase is usually translated that way round (a ‘pretty bane’ is how she is described in the Oxford World’s Classics edition). But both words are adjectives, and both can have a moral or physical meaning: kalos can be fine, beautiful, pretty, and also morally good, noble or virtuous. Kakos, equally, can be bad or evil, and also inept, ugly, unfortunate. We could translate the phrase the other way around: rather than being a beautiful evil, Pandora could be an ugly good. We never do translate it like this, though, because there is so much other evidence piled up in favour of the traditional version: all the gods provide Pandora with lovely qualities, so she must be beautiful. And anyway, Zeus demands her creation as ant’ agathoio – in return for the good thing (fire). The word agathos really is unambiguous: it always means something desirable or good. But the word anti is a bit more fluid. It can mean opposite, before, in return for, for the sake of. Translators have always assumed that Pandora is beautiful but evil because Zeus demands payback for the fire mortals have illicitly gained. But kakon doesn’t have to have a moral dimension at all: we could translate it with equal accuracy to mean a loss, a misfortune, an injury. Something bad for us, but not something ill-intentioned in its own right. Zeus may wish us ill, in other words, but that doesn’t mean Pandora herself is evil, any more than the lightning which Zeus hurls at those of us who displease him is evil. Lightning is neutral, neither good nor bad, however much we fear it. Perhaps we can accept that Pandora is the same, unless we choose to see her otherwise.





Jocasta




IN THE FOURTH CENTURY BCE, THE COMIC POET ANTIPHANES MADE a pointed remark about the relative difficulty of writing comedy over tragedy.1 Comedians, he has a character explain, have to invent their plots. Whereas a tragedian just has to mention Oedipus and the audience knows everything else: that his father was Laius, his mother was Jocasta, who his daughters were, what he would do, what he had done.

Was Antiphanes correct, and is he still? Does everyone today know who Oedipus was? And what more do we know about him, beyond the barest branches of his (admittedly complex) family tree? Equally relevant, what do we know about his mother, Jocasta, who shares his downfall? And how does her character shift in the different versions of the stories told about the royal house of Thebes, one of the best-known of all Greek myths? Its modern notoriety is at least in part thanks to Freud, who, in his famed Oedipus complex, posited that all boys go through a phase of wanting to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers.

Only seven Sophocles plays have survived to the present day, the most famous of which was and remains Oedipus the King. Its title in Greek is Oedipus Tyrannos, and, for reasons which defy common sense, it is routinely referred to today as Oedipus Rex, in spite of the fact that no one involved in it is Roman (the word rex is the Latin for ‘king’) and it makes any normal person think of dinosaurs, which do not feature. About a century after it was first produced, Aristotle would discuss it favourably in his Poetics, implying that it was still regularly performed and would be well known to his audience. He thought it the perfect tragedy.

Astonishingly, given its enduring popularity, Oedipus Tyrannos only came second in the competition when it was first staged (perhaps in 429 BCE). Sophocles was beaten by Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus. Ancient and modern scholars have used this fact to prove the terrible stupidity of judges when it comes to making the right choice in creative contests. A generous person might wonder whether perhaps Philocles was not too bad a playwright, if he could produce something which beat Oedipus. But certainly his contemporaries were having none of it: the comedian, Aristophanes, referred to Philocles’ work leaving a bad taste in the mouth.2