4.5: Pandora, Curse of the Gods

Reflecting upon the Theogony’s nameless woman who alone carries blame for the misery of mankind, audiences are reminded of the text’s condemning tone toward mortal women. Describing the unnamed woman as “an evil thing for men,” it lifts responsibility for the evils of the world from men, placing them firmly upon the head of womankind. In this line of reasoning, Christian and Ancient Greek texts synchronize, citing the curiosity, or weakness, of the first woman as the cause of mankind’s fall from grace.

In Works and Days the vilification of Pandora, and by extension, womankind, persists. Meaning “many gifts” (pan=many or all) and (dora=gift), Pandora represents Zeus' darkly ironic “gift” to Prometheus' progeny. Unlike Eve, who was created to be a helpmate and partner to Adam, Pandora was crafted as an early Trojan Horse, a weapon to humble the burgeoning race of Man. At Zeus' commandment, his most inventive children, Hephaestus, Athene and Hermes, conceive of the counterbalance to Prometheus’ gift of fire: a curse for mankind. Hephaestus mixes water and earth into a primordial clay to mold the first woman with a “lovely maiden-shape, like to the immortal goddesses in face.” Athene is instructed to teach her the necessary domestic arts, while Aphrodite endows her the uncanny combination of grace and remorseless longing and sorrows. Hermes, the trickster, is told to give her a “shameless mind and a deceitful nature,” (Hesiod II. 60-68), which Stanley Lombardo translates as “a bitchy mind and a cheating heart” (qtd. in Harris and Platzner 111). With such characteristics “gifted” by the gods, the overt misogyny is undeniable. Zeus' revenge to modern readers appears bitter and vitriolic, perhaps referential to his own excessive sexual conquests; while he is able to deftly manage his many relations with goddesses, mortal men are really and truly screwed.

Once her internal qualities are sorted, the gods style her with clothes, a crown of flowers and golden necklaces from the goddess of persuasion, but as a strident reminder, Hesiod returns to Hermes’s gifts, specifically the ability to lie and deceive with ease of tongue (Hesiod II. 69-82). The final gift is a jar, not a box which was a 19th century inversion. Ancient Greeks used large earthenware jars as storage vessels, and within this jar she holds a dowry consisting of all the pains of the world. Some versions of the myth state the jar contained the blessings of humankind, and many scholars believe Hesiod wrote his version of the myth based on earlier versions, and in his interpretation, he changed the jar’s contents to the woes of mankind. In either interpretation, this first woman possesses the womb-jar through which she will give birth to the sufferings of mankind.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Pandora receives the gifts of the gods from Athene, while Ares looks pensively over his shoulder in anticipation of conflict between the sexes. The British Museum, London. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, via The Trustees of the British Museum)

While Prometheus is gifted with foresight, a power he uses to warn his brother not to accept any gift from Zeus, his brother Epimetheus [epih-MEE-thee-uhs], is fated to ignore the warning, for his name means “after-thought” or “hindsight.” He represents the impulsive blindness of one initially smitten with the beguiling offer of a divine benefaction, unable or unwilling to see the cost. Yet, Epimetheus’s folly isn’t the focus of Hesiod’s lesson. As a Titan, his character is fixed and unblemished as the basic manifestation of hindsight. Pandora, however, is the representative of current and future sorrows and the legacy of blamed women who will follow, like Helen and Eve. The prototype may have been influenced by an earlier goddess called Bios, “Giver of All,” who held the ability to give and take away life. By Hesiod’s time, however, Zeus had supplanted all versions of primordial goddesses, as he does in Works and Days, assuming the procreative powers of Bios by refashioning her as Pandora. This inversion of creative powers addresses both the etiological explanation for the separation between gods and man, and the existence of pain and misery, but it also extends the feminist and historical explanation for the subversion of potent goddesses in favor of the patriarchy.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The Birth of Pandora. Epimetheus, with a mallet in his right hand, receives her as she rises from the earth. Eros hovers above to ensure the union. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK. ( CC BY-SA 4.0 International, via Wikimedia)

Hesiod essentially argues that in ordering the creation of the “lovely evil” Zeus provides a cosmic balance to the advantage humans gained from Prometheus' enlightenment. Pandora, dressed in attractive packaging is analogous to the lesser sacrifice richly dressed to trick Zeus at Mekone. For all the evils the jar released, though, Pandora is credited with closing the lid while hope remained inside, leaving humans with the most essential gift, the ability to remain resilient in the face of disease, violent destruction and death.