Pandora, by French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), painted in 1890. Pandora is the Greeks’ Eve, whose unthinking act precipitated mankind’s toilsome life and the cycle of birth and death. There are however key differences. Eve was always intended as a blessing to Adam, whereas Pandora was intended as a curse. And in the Bible, though the ills of mankind came through one woman, they were wiped out and changed for blessings through another – as Cassiani defiantly reminded Emperor Theophilus. See The Emperor and the Nun.
Part 1 of 2
IT is said that men were first formed from clay by the Titan Prometheus, and that Athene breathed life into them. Zeus was jealous, and though he did not stop men living in ease upon the hills, for in this Golden Age there was none of the toil and sickness we know today, he resolved never to let men have fire. Undeterred, Prometheus stole sparks from the chariot of the sun and brought them to men inside a fennel stalk,* for which Zeus in his wrath bound him to a rock in the Caucasus for ever, where an eagle fed daily upon his liver.*
Zeus was not yet finished. He engaged Hephaestus to fashion a new clay figure, a woman (and as yet men had no women), as heartbreakingly lovely as the goddesses who then lavished on her every gift and allurement. She was named Pandora, all-gifts, and the Titan Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother, was the lucky fellow to whom Zeus presented her.*
In the 6th century AD, two Greek monks smuggled silkworms out from China to Constantinople in bamboo sticks, much as Prometheus smuggled fire to men with his hollowed-out fennel reed. Later on raids by Arabs, Normans and Crusaders forced the Greek silk merchants to seek refuge in Italy, and from there the technique was brought to England by John Lombe in the 17th century, after he went undercover to discover the Italians’ secrets.
Prometheus was rescued eventually by Heracles. See Heracles and the Garden of the Hesperides.
Prometheus means ‘foresighted’, and Epimetheus means ‘hindsighted’ with the overtones of being (not very) wise after the event.
Précis
After Prometheus created the race of men and gave them fire in direct defiance of Zeus’s will, the King of the gods was angry and determined to spoil Prometheus’s handiwork. So he had Hephaestus make the first woman, and asked the goddesses to shower her with countless graces and gifts, before sending her to Prometheus’s unwary brother, Epimetheus. (58 / 60 words)
Part Two
Jars in the palace at Knossos in Crete, standing at the southern entrance. The Greek pithos was a storage jar, which could be extremely large: King Eurystheus, who sent Heracles on his twelve labours, was accustomed to hide inside a pithos every time Heracles came back with some scary animal in tow. A mistranslation of pithos by Erasmus (1466-1536), confusing it with pixis, a box, led Pandora’s Jar to become Pandora’s Box.
THE moment he saw her, the besotted Epimetheus at once forgot Prometheus’s warning never to accept any gift from Zeus, and welcomed Pandora, who was clutching a large wine-jar that Zeus had put into her hands, into his home with all festivity.
Once comfortably settled, Pandora decided to take a look inside her jar. She prised open the lid, and instantly there flew from it in a toxic stream the ills of which mankind as yet knew nothing, all the grief and toil and disease. She snapped the lid shut, but too late.* Everything inside had escaped, except for Hope.
Why did Zeus put kindly Hope among the ills he wished on mankind? When the lid snapped shut, did Pandora save Hope for mankind, or keep Hope from mankind? Or perhaps (for the Greek word is ambiguous) it was not Hope in there so much as anxious Foreboding, and Pandora has at least spared us that? To such questions the teasing myth gives no answer.
Hesiod indicates that Zeus had been preventing Pandora from shutting the lid up to this moment, when he removed his divine resistance and the lid abruptly shut.
Précis
Epimetheus took Pandora into his home, all unsuspecting, and there Pandora (herself completely innocent in all that followed) opened the jar that Zeus had given her. Out poured every grief and affliction since known to mortal men. Hope alone remained; and whether that was a good thing or a bad remains a matter of controversy to this day. (58 / 60 words)
