Prometheus had warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from Zeus, but Epimetheus did not listen he accepted Pandora, who promptly scattered the contents of her jar. In Hesiod’s retelling of her story, Pandora brings with her a jar (which, due to textual corruption in the sixteenth century, with the mistranslation from Pithos to pyx, the Latin for “box,” came to be called a box) containing “countless plagues.” Only thing left after Pandora opened box was “hope” This name, however, amplifies her original nature as the earth mother and the original mother of mankind. The god Hermes also gave her the power of speech, putting in her “lies and crafty words” Hesiod claims, then bestowing on her a name, “Pandora,”(i.e. Hesiod then says “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.” But she was “sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.” When she first appears before gods and mortals, “wonder seized them” as they looked upon her, he relates. This woman goes unnamed in the Theogony but is presumably Pandora, whose myth Hesiod revisited in his later poem, “Works and Days.” He commands Hephaestus to mold from earth the first woman, a “beautiful evil” whose descendants would torment the human race.Īfter Hephaestus does so, Athena dresses her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands, and an ornate crown of silver. After humans received the stolen gift of fire from Prometheus, an angry Zeus decides to give humanity a punishing gift to compensate for the boon they had been given. The Pandora myth first appeared in written history in lines 560–612 of Hesiod’s poem the “Theogony,” which was written in circa 8th–7th centuries BC, without ever giving her a name. Hesiod changes Pandora story, making her scapegoat for humanity’s ills Later poets, dramatists, painters, and sculptors made her their subject, and she has thus come down to us as the one who releases chaos into the world, becoming the focus of all our griefs and uncertainties. Hesiod’s very negative interpretation of the Pandora story went on to influence both Jewish and Christian theology and perpetuated her bad reputation into the Renaissance. The mistranslation of pithos is usually attributed to the 16th century humanist Erasmus who, in his Latin account of the story of Pandora, changed the Greek pithos to pyxis, meaning “box.” The context in which the story appeared was Erasmus’ collection of proverbs, the “Adagia,” or Adages, in 1508. Many scholars also see a fascinating analogy between Pandora herself, who was made from clay and the clay jar which dispenses evils. Pithoi were used for storage of wine, oil, grain or other provisions, or, ritually, as a container for a human body for burying, from which it was believed souls escaped and necessarily returned. The word translated as “box” was actually a large jar in Greek antiquity (πίθος, “pithos”). Pithos becomes Pandora’s box (from the Latin, Pyx) The Pandora myth addressed the question of why there is evil in the world, according to which, Pandora opened a jar (pithos, commonly referred to as “Pandora’s box”) releasing all the evils of humanity. Her other name is Anesidora, or “she who sends up gifts”-up implying “from below” within the earth. “gift,” thus “the all-endowed,” “all-gifted,” or “all-giving,” was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus, the greatest of the gods. But the story we often hear of her was told through a much different lens, through the Greek writer Hesiod, and that one makes her into the ultimate scapegoat, on which humanity can hang all its troubles.
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