Pandora

Hesiod tells the story twice, in two different works, with different emphases each time. In the Theogony, Zeus orders Pandora's creation as direct retaliation. Prometheus has tricked him at a sacrifice and then stolen fire for humanity a second time. Hephaestus shapes her out of earth and water in the likeness of a modest maiden, and Athena dresses and adorns her (Theogony 570-584). Hesiod frames the result as a "beautiful evil" given to men in exchange for the good of fire (Theogony 585). It is a trap built to look like a gift.

Works and Days tells the fuller version of what happens next. Every god contributes something to her making. Hephaestus again shapes her body, and Athena teaches her needlework and weaving. Aphrodite pours grace and painful longing over her. Hermes gives her a deceptive nature, cunning, and the power of speech (Works and Days 60-68). That is why she is named Pandora, "all-gifted" (Works and Days 80-82). Zeus gives her a sealed storage jar, a pithos. He sends her to Epimetheus, Prometheus's brother, whose name means "afterthought." Epimetheus accepts the gift despite his brother's explicit warning never to take anything from Zeus (Works and Days 83-89). Pandora opens the jar, whether from curiosity or because opening it was simply what she was made to eventually do. She releases sickness, hard labor, and countless other evils to spread invisibly among mortals, who had lived free of them before (Works and Days 90-104). Only Hope, Elpis, remains trapped inside when she claps the lid back down (Works and Days 96-99).

Hesiod then offers a second account of the same loss. Straight after the jar, the Works and Days describes five successive races of humankind, beginning with the carefree Golden Age and sinking to the toil of the present Iron Age.

Erasmus, translating the story into Latin in the sixteenth century, rendered pithos as pyxis, a small box. He apparently confused it with an unrelated story he knew from Latin sources. "Pandora's box" has been the standard English phrase ever since, even though nothing in the Greek text describes anything box-shaped. Hope may be a small mercy or a further cruelty that keeps hope out of reach of the suffering the jar releases. That has been argued over since antiquity, and Hesiod's text does not settle it either way. Modern feminist scholarship has widely read Pandora as a Greek counterpart to Eve, the woman blamed for the world's troubles, though the two stories developed independently. The premise that a woman's body can be shaped rather than born recurs elsewhere in Greek myth, most directly in Pygmalion's ivory statue, carved by his own hand and warmed into life by Aphrodite rather than shaped by a craftsman-god at Zeus's order.