Every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards. Myths may be the home of the miraculous, but they are also mirrors of us. Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth#5016•
Chapter 1
This poem is an origin story which catalogues the genealogy of the gods. First comes Chaos, then Earth, then the Underworld, and perhaps the first character we might recognize: Eros, who softens flesh and overcomes reason. Chaos creates Erebus and Night, Night creates Air and Day, Earth creates Heaven, and so on.
Two generations on, we get to Zeus: Heaven (Ouranos) and Earth (Gaia) have multiple children including Kronos and Rhea.
Ouranos turns out to be less than ideal parent material, hiding his children away in a cavern and refusing to let them out into the light.
To win freedom from their oppression, Kronos eventually castrates his father with a sharp hook given to him by his mother, and throws the disembodied genitals into the sea (which is what creates Aphrodite.
This is probably the time to start pondering whether Freud might have something to say about any of this).
Kronos and Rhea in turn have multiple children: these pre-Olympian gods are known as Titans.
Then Kronos also fails a basic fatherhood test, choosing to swallow each of his offspring whole.
Rhea gives birth to Zeus in secret so he won't be eaten, then Zeus forces Kronos to regurgitate his older siblings and takes over the mantle of king of the gods for himself.
It scarcely needs saying that family gatherings must have been fraught affairs.#5025•
Zeus is often described as clever and strategic, but he is soon thwarted twice by the wily Titan Prometheus. Hesiod is obviously looking for a story that explains why his fellow Greeks sacrifice the bones of an animal to the gods, and keep the choice cuts of meat for themselves. Given that sacrifice should presumably involve the loss of something good, and given that the bones are not the best bit of a dead ox, an explanation is required#5026•
Prometheus' second piece of trickery is outright theft: he steals fire (which belongs to the gods) and shares it with mortals. He is famously punished for this by being tied to a rock and having his liver pecked out by an eagle. His immortality means that his liver grows back, so the whole grisly business can begin anew each day.
Zeus is so incensed by the improvement in mortal lives which fire has brought that he decides to give us an evil (kakon)6 to balance things out.
He gets Hephaestus to mould from the earth the likeness of a young woman.
The goddess Athene dresses the unnamed maiden in silver clothes and gives her a veil and a golden crown, decorated with images of wild animals.
When Hephaestus and Athene have finished their work, they show the kalon kakon, ant'agathoio – beautiful evil, the price of good – to the other gods, who realize that mortal men will have no device or remedy against her.
From this woman, Hesiod says, comes the whole deadly race of women.
Always nice to be wanted.#5014•
Their focus is almost always on the destruction which Pandora has wreaked or will imminently wreak, which is surely a consequence of the mingling of the Pandora and Eve narratives. The emphasis in Pandora's story for centuries has been her single-handed role in the fall of man. Just as Adam and the snake dodge so much of the blame in Eve's story, so Zeus, Hermes and Epimetheus have been exonerated in almost every later version of Pandora's.
The guiding principle when searching for the cause of everything wrong in the world has been, all too often: cherchez la femme.#5044•
On the pedestal is the birth of Pandora who was, as has been sung about by Hesiod and others, the first woman. Before her, Pausanias reiterates, there was no womankind. Again, no mention of any jar or its contents. It seems reasonable to suggest that, for the ancients, Pandora's role as the ancestor of all women was far more important than her disputed role in opening the world to incessant evil.
Even if, for Hesiod, these two amount to much the same thing.#5056•
But as informed guesses go, it seems reasonable to suggest that the Athenians included the relief of Pandora in their temple because she was the Ur-woman, the woman from whom all women are descended. The Athenians' attitude to women is hard for us to understand today. The polis – the city-state and all the democratic institutions which contributed to it – was a male-only enclave.
Only men could vote, or serve on juries, or take part in Athenian civic life at all.
Women were more or less cloistered (depending on class, and money) and might go for long periods of time without even speaking to men to whom they were not closely related.
The Athenian ideal, espoused in Pericles' funeral oration in 431 BCE, was that women should aspire never to be talked about, either in terms of blame or praise.
The greatest virtue, in other words, that an Athenian woman could aspire to was not to be registered, almost not to exist.
It is a gratifying quirk of Pericles' character that he could make this speech while living with the most famous (or perhaps notorious) woman in Athens, one mentioned by everyone from comedians to philosophers: Aspasia.
Thankfully the hypocrisy of censuring women's behaviour in general while maintaining an entirely different set of standards for the actual women you know has now died out.#5048•
Even Greek grammar obliterated women. When Athenian men referred to a group of themselves, they would use the words hoi Athenaioi – 'the Athenian men' (the endings of both words are masculine). If a mixed-sex group of Athenians gathered, the phrase used to describe them would be exactly the same – if even one man was present among dozens of women, the word-ending used to describe the group is masculine: –oi.
For an all-female group of Athenians, the words would be hai Athenaiai.
I say 'would be' because that phrase is not found anywhere in extant Greek literature:21 no one ever needs to refer to a group of Athenian women, because they aren't important.#5041•
Perhaps it's not surprising that Pandora's role as our ancestor has been largely forgotten today. Instead, her Old Testament semi-equivalent has taken precedence in our collective consciousness. Just as Deucalion (the survivor of the Great Flood in Greek myth) has been largely forgotten while Noah and his ark sail cheerily to salvation, so Pandora has been approximated or replaced by Eve.
But why has the box she never carried exerted such a fascination on so many artists and writers? 'Pandora's box' is an idiom, a shorthand in a way that 'Eve's apple' never has been.
And no usage of it is ever positive, as in the Aesop version where the box is full of treats which we have inadvertently let slip through our careless hands.
At best, we might use it to imply that a set of unforeseen consequences has now come into play.
But more usually, when someone opens Pandora's box, it is both negative and somewhat worse than might have been anticipated, or on a much larger and more damaging scale.
Like opening a can of worms and finding it to be full of poisonous snakes instead.#5036•
It's surely not enough to blame the whole thing on Erasmus. Countless translators have made countless errors in texts through the ages, and most of them have had nothing like the resonance or impact that Erasmus' mix-up of pithos and pyxis has had. But somehow, he coined an idea which has echoed through the centuries.
Everything used to be okay, but then a single, irreversible bad decision was made, and now we all live with the consequences forever.
It's reassuring in a way: the problem was caused long before we were born and will persist long after our deaths, so there's nothing we can really do about it.#5055•