Moulded out of clay by the smith god as a punishment for stolen fire
Hephaestus made her; Athena dressed her, Aphrodite gave charm and Hermes a cunning tongue
Myth · Greek
Pandora
Greek mythology — the first woman
The first woman in Hesiod's account, made from clay by Hephaestus at Zeus's order and given gifts by all the gods — beauty, skill, a shameless mind — as the price mankind paid for stolen fire. Married to the Titan Epimetheus, she lifted the lid of a great storage jar and let out every sickness and sorrow in the world, shutting it again just in time to keep hope inside. The box is a Renaissance mistranslation.
How to spot them
- ▸The lid of a jar being lifted, and small winged evils escaping
- ▸Quiz clue: 'all-gifted', 'Epimetheus', 'pithos not pyxis', 'only hope remained'
- ▸Made of clay and water, and given as a punishment dressed as a present
- ▸Her daughter survived the flood that drowned the rest of mankind
Stories & episodes
Lifted the lid of a great jar and let out every evil in the world
Sickness, toil and sorrow, which had been unknown until then
Only hope was still inside when the lid came down again
Hesiod leaves it ambiguous whether trapping hope is a mercy or a further cruelty
Married the Titan whose name means 'afterthought', against his brother's warning
Epimetheus accepted the gift Prometheus had told him to refuse
A sixteenth-century mistranslation turned her jar into a box
Erasmus rendered Hesiod's pithos as pyxis, and the phrase stuck in every European language
Her name means 'all-gifted' — or, just as plausibly, 'all-giving'
The ambiguity may preserve an older earth-goddess behind Hesiod's cautionary tale
Quick-fire facts
- •Hesiod tells the story twice, in the Theogony and in Works and Days; only the second mentions the jar
- •The container is a pithos, a large storage jar, not a box
- •Erasmus's Latin version of the 1500s introduced pyxis (box), and the error became permanent
- •Elpis — hope, or expectation — was the one thing left inside
- •Her husband was Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus
- •Her daughter Pyrrha and Pyrrha's husband Deucalion survived the flood and repeopled the earth by throwing stones over their shoulders
- •Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John William Waterhouse both painted her at the jar
- •Pandora is a moon of Saturn, a shepherd moon of the F ring
Drill it — 8 cards
1 / 8new card
Sources
- Hesiod — Works and Days Lines 60–105: the making of the first woman and the opening of the jar
- Aaron J. Atsma, the Theoi Project — Pandora