Pandora

Also Known As: Greek Pandora, “all-gifts” or “all-giving”; called Anesidora, “she who sends up gifts”, on a fifth-century Athenian cup
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: She is the first woman, assembled from earth and water by the gods and fitted out by each of them with a gift, including the deceit that makes her work.
Role in Mythos: She is Zeus’s payment to humanity for Prometheus’s theft of fire, and the hand that lifts the lid off the jar holding every sickness and sorrow that has troubled people since.
Relation to Humans: Every human being descends from her through her daughter Pyrrha, and every human affliction is credited to her in the same breath. She is the only figure in Greek myth who is simultaneously the ancestor of the race and the reason the race suffers.

The smith wet the earth himself and worked it cold, on an order from Zeus that came with laughter. What came out of his hands had the face of a deathless goddess and the body of a girl, and it could not yet do anything at all. So the others queued up to finish her. Athena belted and dressed her and taught her the loom. Persuasion and the Graces hung gold at her throat. The Hours put a crown of spring flowers on her head, and the smith set a worked golden diadem over that, covered in figures of every beast the land and sea hold. Hermes came last and put lies in her mouth, wheedling words, and the habits of a thief.

Then they named her for the procedure. Pandora, all-gifts, because everyone on Olympus had contributed something.

Not one of the gifts was kindness.

She was made as a payment, and the sequence is what gives the story its chill. Prometheus had stolen fire and carried it down to people, and Zeus, having laughed out loud at his own idea, announced that he would give humanity a thing in exchange for the fire that they would all take to their hearts while embracing their own scourge. The punishment was designed and built before it was delivered. She is the price of the flame.

Prometheus had warned his brother about exactly this. Take nothing from Olympian Zeus, he said, send it straight back, in case it turns out to be some evil for mortal men. His brother’s name is Epimetheus, which means afterthought, and the name is the whole of his character. He took the gift and kept it. He understood afterward.

Before her, the story insists, men lived on the earth free of evils, free of grinding work, free of the hard diseases that hand people over to death. Whether that was ever true is a separate question and Hesiod does not entertain it.

Somewhere in the house there was a jar. Not a box and not a casket: a pithos, the fat earthenware storage vessel that stood shoulder-high in a Greek yard with its base sunk into the ground, the kind used for oil and grain and wine, sealed with a heavy lid. Hesiod never explains where it came from or who told her anything about it. He simply has it there, and then he has her hands on it. She put her hands under the great lid and lifted, and everything inside got out.

They went out silently, which is the detail that lasts. Zeus took the voices of the diseases so that they could arrive without warning, by day and by night, and there was no way to hear one coming. The earth filled up with them. The sea filled up with them. Only one thing did not leave. Elpis, Hope, stayed inside under the rim, in what Hesiod calls her indestructible home, because the lid came down again before she reached the mouth.

Readers have argued about that line for two and a half thousand years and have not settled it. If Hope stays in the jar, do people have her or not? If the jar held evils, why was Hope in there with them? Some have read Elpis less as consolation than as expectation, a clear sight of how bad things are going to get, in which case shutting her in was a mercy and ignorance is the last gift. The poem does not say. It moves straight on to the line that from the mind of Zeus there is no escape.

There was another version running alongside it, and it inverts everything. Theognis and the Aesopic tradition give Pandora a jar of blessings rather than a jar of ills, sealed and left in human hands, and when the lid comes off the good things fly back up to the gods and are never seen again. Hope alone stays behind because the lid caught her. Same jar, same lid, same woman, opposite contents, and Hope ends up in the same place either way. It is the one fixed point in the story.

In the older of Hesiod’s two accounts, the *Theogony*, there is no jar at all. There is only the woman, made as a beautiful evil, a kalon kakon, a steep trap from which there is no climbing out, and from her comes the race of women, whom the poem compares to drones sitting in a hive eating what other bees gathered. A man who avoids marriage reaches a bitter old age with no one to bury him and his property is divided among distant relatives. A man who marries lives with the trouble. That is the whole of the offer.

Her appearance is unusually well documented for a Greek figure, because Athens liked to look at her. A white-ground cup in the British Museum, painted around 470 BCE, shows her standing rigid and face-forward like an archaic wooden idol in a long starred chiton while Athena fastens it for her, and the name written beside her is not Pandora but Anesidora, she who sends up gifts, with the sending coming from below, out of the ground. Her birth was carved along the base of the Athena Parthenos inside the Parthenon, which is a strange place to put the origin of all human misery, directly under the feet of the city’s goddess.

That inscription has fed the most persistent modern reading of her: that behind Hesiod’s manufactured woman stands an older earth goddess, all-giving rather than all-gifted, whose meaning the poets reversed. Jane Ellen Harrison argued it forcefully around the turn of the twentieth century, and it remains an argument rather than a finding. What is certain is that the two names pull in opposite directions, one receiving and one bestowing, and Greek does not decide between them.

The box is younger than all of it. Erasmus, translating the story into Latin for his *Adagia* in 1508, rendered the pithos as a pyxis, a small lidded container, quite possibly because he had Psyche’s box in mind from a different story altogether. The mistake was too good to correct. A vast half-buried jar of oil is harder to picture than a pretty casket, and English has kept the casket ever since.

What Pandora does, she does once, and it cannot be undone. Her power is entirely in the lid, and her weakness is that she was assembled to lift it. The gods who made her put curiosity and deceit in her along with the golden necklaces, then sat back and waited, which makes her less a culprit than a mechanism. She has no cult, no prayers, no myth after the jar, and no defence anyone bothered to write down. She had one daughter, Pyrrha, who survived the flood with Deucalion and repopulated the world by throwing stones over her shoulder, so the line held. Everyone alive is descended from the woman who opened it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pandora in Greek mythology?

Pandora was the first woman in Greek myth, created by the gods on Zeus’s orders as a punishment for humanity after Prometheus stole fire. Hephaestus shaped her from earth and water, Athena dressed and taught her, the Graces and the Hours adorned her, and Hermes gave her deceitful speech. Her name means “all-gifts,” because every Olympian contributed something to her making.

Was it really Pandora’s box?

No, it was a jar. Hesiod’s word is pithos, a large earthenware storage vessel of the kind Greeks half-buried in the ground for oil, wine or grain. The “box” comes from Erasmus, who translated pithos as the Latin pyxis, meaning a small lidded container, in his *Adagia* of 1508, and the error stuck because it made a better image.

What was left in Pandora’s jar?

Elpis, meaning Hope, remained inside under the rim after everything else escaped, because Zeus caused the lid to fall before she could reach the mouth. Hesiod does not explain what that means, and readers have disagreed ever since about whether hope is preserved for humanity or withheld from it. Some interpretations treat Elpis less as comfort than as foreknowledge of coming suffering.

Why did Zeus create Pandora?

Zeus created Pandora as payment for the fire that Prometheus stole from the gods and gave to mortals. He said he would give people an evil thing that they would all cherish while embracing their own ruin, and he laughed when he decided it. Prometheus warned his brother Epimetheus to refuse any gift from Zeus, but Epimetheus accepted her anyway.

Was Pandora a goddess or a mortal?

Pandora is a mortal woman in Hesiod, manufactured rather than born, and she has no cult or worship. Her name appears as Anesidora, “she who sends up gifts,” on a fifth-century Athenian cup, which has led some scholars to argue that an older earth goddess lies behind the figure, but that remains an interpretation rather than an attested tradition.