You have all doubtlessly heard the story of Pandora at some point or another. The story begins with Zeus, who decides to punish humans for having received fire from the Titan Prometheus, so he creates Pandora, the first woman, and gives her to Prometheus’s twin brother Epimetheus. Epimetheus accepts Pandora and marries her, even though Prometheus has previously warned him never to accept any kind of gifts from Zeus under any circumstances. Along with Pandora, Zeus also gives Epimetheus a jar with a lid and instructs him that the jar must never be opened under any circumstances. Epimetheus warns Pandora not to open the jar, but then, once Epimetheus is out of the house, Pandora ignores his warning, opens the jar, and unleashes all the evils of the earth, causing untold suffering for all mankind. Pandora slams the lid shut on the jar, trapping the one thing left inside, Hope.
The story of Pandora comes from the ancient Greek poem Theogonia, which was written in the seventh or eighth century B.C. by the Boeotian poet Hesiodos of Askre.
In most retellings of the story, it is about a box, not a jar. This is because, in the sixteenth century A.D., the Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam translated Theogonia from the original ancient Greek into Latin. He accidentally mistranslated the Greek word πίθος, meaning “a large storage jar with a lid,” to the Latin word pyxis, meaning “box.” Ever since then people having been saying “Pandora’s box,” even though the original story is actually about a jar, not a box.
You may be under the impression that the story of Pandora was told to warn children about the dangers of disobeying their parents’ orders. In actuality, this was not the case at all. Hesiodos of Askre was a raving misogynist and he hated women with a burning passion. The entire reason why he told the story of Pandora was to blame women for all of the problems in the world. In Theogonia 590-612, Hesiodos writes, as translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White:
“For from her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. And as in thatched hives bees feed the drones whose nature is to do mischief — by day and throughout the day until the sun goes down the bees are busy and lay the white combs, while the drones stay at home in the covered skeps and reap the toil of others into their own bellies — even so Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil. And he gave them a second evil to be the price for the good they had: whoever avoids marriage and the sorrows that women cause, and will not wed, reaches deadly old age without anyone to tend his years, and though he at least has no lack of livelihood while he lives, yet, when he is dead, his kinsfolk divide his possessions amongst them. And as for the man who chooses the lot of marriage and takes a good wife suited to his mind, evil continually contends with good; for whoever happens to have mischievous children, lives always with unceasing grief in his spirit and heart within him; and this evil cannot be healed.”
So basically, Hesiodos tells the whole story as a way of taking every single awful thing that has ever happened in all of human history and blaming it all on women. When we look at the story from this perspective, it does not seem nearly as edifying as it did when we looked at the story itself when taken out of its original context.
Perhaps the story is much better– and much more useful– if we simply forget its original misogynistic purpose and apply the story to teach a new lesson, which is that ignoring warnings from others rarely results in anything good.
SOURCES
Hesiodos of Askre. Theogonia.
Hesiodos of Askre. Works and Days.
IMAGE CREDITS
The image at the beginning of this article is a nineteenth century engraving based on an oil painting by the English painter F.S. Church. This image was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons. This image is in the public domain in the United States of America.
