Elpis

The lid comes down before she can follow. Every other thing in the jar has already gone, pouring out into the bright morning over a world that had never tasted them, and she is left alone in the dark beneath the rim, close enough to the opening to feel the draft on her face, never quite through it. She does not beat against the clay. She waits. This is most of what Elpis does, and it has been enough to keep her name alive for three thousand years.

What she looks like depends on who is doing the looking. Greek art gives her almost nothing, a young woman with an armful of flowers and little more; the people who needed her most left the fewest pictures of her. Rome made up the difference. There she is Spes, a slim figure in a long flowing gown, a single braid falling down her back, caught mid-step with one hand lifting the hem of her skirt and the other holding out a flower just beginning to open. The whole image is built around spring, the green shoot, the bud that has not yet failed. Hope, the Romans decided, ought to look like something about to grow.

Her story begins with a punishment. When Prometheus stole fire back for mortals, Zeus answered with a gift that was really a trap. He had Hephaestus shape the first woman out of earth and water, handed her to Epimetheus, and sent her down with a sealed jar. Pandora lifted the great lid, and out came everything that makes a human life hard: sickness, toil, the slow griefs that age a person before their time, plagues past counting that drift by day and night and make no sound. By the time she understood, the jar was nearly empty. Only Elpis remained inside, stopped beneath the rim by the lid that fell back into place, held there, Hesiod says, by the will of Zeus himself.

Here the oldest argument in the story begins, and nobody has ever finished it. No one can agree why she was kept. If the jar was full of evils, then trapping hope inside means hope was withheld from us, sealed away with the rest of the bad. If hope is a good thing, then keeping her in the one vessel that did not spill means she was preserved for us, the single mercy that survived the spill. The Greeks went back and forth on this for centuries. Some of them did not even think she belonged among the curses at all.

Theognis told it the other way around. In his version the jar held the good powers, and when it opened they fled the earth for Olympus, Trust and Restraint and the Graces all abandoning a world that had stopped deserving them. Only Elpis stayed. She was, he wrote, the last good god left among mankind, and he told men to pray to her first and last, because she was all they had.

Other writers worried at the same knot from their own angles. Aeschylus has Prometheus boast that he cured mortals of foreseeing their own deaths by planting blind hopes in their breasts, and the chorus calls it a great gift, though the word blind sits uneasily inside the praise. Pindar called her the sweet nurse of old age, the fosterer of the heart, the power that rules the changeable mind of man. A normal moment for Elpis is quiet and nearly invisible: a man lies awake while fever moves through his house, and the thing that keeps him from giving up has no face he could name.

Aesop kept the jar and changed its cargo. There it brims with good things, and when a man pries the lid off out of plain curiosity they all rush back up to the gods, every one except Hope, who stays behind still promising to hand out the blessings that flew away. It is a gentler story and a crueler one at once, hope as the friend who keeps swearing the others are coming back. Sophocles gave her a child, Pheme, rumour and report, the talk that runs ahead of the truth, which is exactly the sort of offspring expectation would produce.

What Greece never gave her, Rome did. Elpis had no temple in Greece, no festival, no priesthood; she was a feeling people argued about rather than a goddess they served. As Spes she became a power of the state, with a temple in the Forum Holitorium, the crowded vegetable market loud with sellers and thick with the smell of produce, raised in the third century before the common era and standing among the official virtues of Rome beside Faith and Health and Harmony. Emperors stamped her on their coins as Spes Augusta, hope made imperial, the promise that the ruler and his heirs would keep the people safe. Her strength has always been this constancy: she is the consolation that outlasts every other, the one thing that does not leave when sickness and poverty and loss move in, the medicine, as one late poet put it, that lets long-suffering mortals forget their troubles enough to keep going.

Her weakness is folded into the same nature. She does nothing. She cannot act, cannot strike, cannot mend a single one of the evils she was shut in with; she can only stay, and a comfort that only stays can also lie. The blind hope Aeschylus named is the hope that keeps the doomed man from running and the idle man from working, the sweet bane Nonnus wished Pandora had never uncorked. She is held, besides, by something outside herself, kept under the rim by a lid she did not close, owing her meaning to a jar. Let her out and the whole argument shifts. While she stays, she is everyone’s and no one’s, the last thing in the dark that did not fly away.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Elpis in Greek mythology?

Elpis is the personified spirit, or daimon, of hope and expectation in Greek mythology, known to the Romans as Spes. She is best remembered as the single thing that remained inside Pandora’s jar after all the evils of the world flew out to plague mankind.

What happened to Elpis in the story of Pandora’s jar?

In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Pandora lifts the lid of a great jar and releases countless plagues, sicknesses, and sorrows upon humankind, but Elpis stays behind under the rim because the lid is shut again, by the will of Zeus, before she can escape. Why she was left inside, whether as a comfort or a curse, the Greeks never agreed.

Is Elpis good or evil?

Elpis is not evil, but the Greeks regarded her with suspicion. Some saw her as the one consolation that helps mortals endure suffering, while others treated hope as a “blind” delusion that keeps the doomed and the idle from facing reality and acting.

What is the difference between Elpis and Spes?

Elpis is the Greek personification of hope and had almost no formal worship in Greece. Spes, her Roman counterpart, was an established state goddess with a temple in Rome’s Forum Holitorium and appeared on imperial coins as Spes Augusta, embodying the collective hopes of the empire.

How was Elpis depicted in art?

In Greek art Elpis appears simply as a young woman carrying flowers in her arms. As the Roman Spes she is shown as a slim young woman in a flowing gown with a single long braid, stepping forward while lifting her hem and holding out a budding flower, an image of fresh spring growth.

Related Entries

Pandora, Prometheus, Epimetheus, Zeus, Hephaestus, Hermes, Nyx, Erebus, Hemera, Apate, Eleos, Ker, Thanatos, Nemesis, Nike