Was it a Box? Or a Jar?

 

Was it a Box? Or a Jar?

 

 

As mentioned in the Greek mythology, Fire was once the sole privilege of the gods. One day, ignoring Zeus’ strict order, Prometheus - a Titan god of fire, stole the fire and gave it to mankind. For this act, Prometheus was punished. Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, instructed to tie him with chains to a rock far away in the Caucasus Mountains where nobody would find him. Every day Zeus sent an eagle to feast upon Prometheus’ liver, which grew back every day so that Prometheus would have to endure this deathly torture every day until Heracles found him. After killing the eagle, he let Prometheus free. In yet more symbolism, the struggle of Prometheus is located by some at Mount Elbrus or at Mount Kazbek, two volcanic promontories in the Caucasus Mountains beyond which for the ancient Greeks, lay the realm of the barbarii.

'Prometheus bringing fire to mankind' by Fueger

 

Despite sentencing Prometheus to eternal torment for his transgression, Zeus had some other plans. He decided to give humanity a punishing gift to compensate for the magical gift they had been given. Zeus instructed Hephaestus to create the first woman, a ‘beautiful evil’ whose descendants would torment the human race. After Hephaestus fashioned the shy maiden out of clay, Athena dressed her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands and an ornate crown of silver. Thus, according to the Greek mythology, the first woman came into being. 

'The Creation of Pandora' by Batten

 

Properly decked up, when she was presented before the other gods and mortals for the first time, ‘wonder seized them’. Though the lady went unnamed in Hesiod’s epic poem – ‘Theogony’, he wrote a lot about her. As mentioned in the poem, she was ‘sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.’ “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.^”

A little bit more about that lady was mentioned in another of Hesiod's works – ‘Works and Days’. As described there, Athena taught her needlework and weaving. Aphrodite, goddess of love, ‘shed grace upon her head and cruel longing and cares that weary the limbs’. Hermes, apart from giving her the power of speech, also bestowed upon ‘a shameless mind and a deceitful nature’. Goddess of the seasons, Horae adorned her with a garland crown. Finally, Hermes gave her the name – ‘Pandora’ (derived from ‘pan’, meaning ‘all’ and ‘doron’, meaning ‘gift’, thus ‘All-Gift’).

'Works and Days' by Hesiod

 

Pandora’s deceitful feminine nature becomes the least of humanity’s worries. Zeus then brought her to Earth to be the wife of Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus. Curiously enough, Prometheus had warned his brother of Zeus’ trickery and told him not to accept any gift from the gods. But, Epimetheus was too taken with her beauty and wanted to marry her anyway.

'Prometheus and Epimetheus before Pandora' by Schlösser

 

As a wedding present, Zeus gave Pandora a ‘magnificent box’ but warned her never to open it. As mentioned in some other sources, it was Mercury who gave her that box. Mercury wouldn't tell them what the box contained but only that it had to remain sealed forever. He asked the couple if he could leave the box with them until he returned from his journey, and they agreed. Pandora, who was created to be curious, couldn’t stay away from the present. All she could think about was its contents. She began to imagine that it contained beautiful gowns or exquisite jewellery, or even money! Finally, curiosity got the better of her and she decided to defy the instruction. She pulled at the gold cord and knots and lifted the heavy lid of that box.

Pandora and her 'box'

 

To her utter surprise there was no gleam of gold or treasure, and not one beautiful dress! Instead, horrible things like greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death started to fly out of it in the form tiny buzzing moths. The creatures stung Pandora over and over again and she was in immense pain. By the time Pandora slammed the lid of the box back down, almost every negative emotions had been let out into the world. The last thing remaining inside of the box was hope. Ever since, humans have been able to hold onto this hope in order to survive the wickedness that Pandora had unknowingly let out. This story gave birth to the idiom – ‘to open a Pandora's box’, meaning to do or start something that will cause many unforeseen problems.

Pandora and her box

 

Interestingly, the myth of Pandora didn’t include a box, but a jar. Pithos is a large jar-shaped storage container. The term in English is applied to such containers used among the civilizations that bordered the Mediterranean Sea in the Neolithic, the Bronze Age and the succeeding Iron Age. Since antiquity, those were used for bulk storage, primarily for wine, oil or grain. It can also refer to a funerary jar. Discarded pithos had some other interesting uses. It was used as a container for a human body for burying, from which it was believed souls escaped and necessarily returned. In Middle Helladic burials in Mycenae and Crete, sometimes the bones of the interred were placed in them.

'Pandora holding a Pithos' by Joseph

 

The mistranslation of pithos, as ‘box’ is usually attributed to the 16^th century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam when he translated Hesiod’s tale of Pandora into Latin. Erasmus translated pithos into the Latin word pyxis, meaning ‘box’.

Pithos

 

The phrase ‘Pandora's box’ has endured ever since.