What Is the Story of Pandora's Box?

In the original Greek, Pandora was given a pithos, a large storage jar of the kind used for grain, wine and oil. The word became box through a translation into Latin in the sixteenth century, and the mistake stuck.

The jar matters slightly, because a household storage vessel places the story in ordinary domestic life rather than in a treasure chamber. What is released is not a magical curse but the everyday conditions of human existence.

Pandora is part of the Prometheus story. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, and Zeus punished him by having him chained and tormented. But Zeus also wanted to punish humanity.

So the gods created Pandora, each contributing a gift, which is what her name means: all gifted. She was sent to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus, along with the jar. The whole sequence is a reprisal for the theft of fire, and Pandora is the instrument rather than the villain.

When the jar was opened, the troubles escaped and scattered beyond recall. The Greek account lists the kinds of thing released:

• •Sickness and disease
• •Toil and hard labour
• •Sorrow and grief
• •Old age and death anxieties

Hope remained in the jar when the lid was replaced. This is the part scholars have argued about for well over two thousand years, because it is genuinely ambiguous.

One reading is comforting: hope stayed with humanity as a consolation. Another is bleak: hope was trapped and withheld, so humans do not have it. A third, and the one many classicists favour, is that hope in the original sense meant anticipation of what is to come, and keeping it contained was a mercy, because knowing your future troubles in advance would be unbearable.

The myth has been used in some unattractive ways historically, particularly as a story blaming a woman for human suffering, and comparisons with other traditions have often reinforced that reading.

Read within its own context it is more specific. Pandora is a manufactured being sent as a punishment by Zeus, acting out a plan she did not devise, in a sequence that starts with Prometheus. The phrase opening Pandora's box has survived as shorthand for an action with unforeseen consequences that cannot be undone.

The two brothers in the story have names that carry the point. Prometheus means forethought and Epimetheus means afterthought, and they behave accordingly.

Prometheus anticipated trouble and warned his brother to accept no gift from the gods. Epimetheus accepted Pandora anyway and only understood the consequences later. Greek myth frequently uses paired figures like this to set out a contrast, and here the pairing frames the whole story as one about foresight and its absence rather than simply about curiosity.

The earliest surviving accounts come from the Greek poet Hesiod, usually dated to around 700 BCE, and he tells the story twice. In his Theogony, a poem about the origins of the gods, the first woman is created as a punishment after Prometheus steals fire, but she is not named Pandora and there is no jar. The emphasis is on her creation. In his Works and Days, a poem about farming, labour and justice, she is named Pandora and the jar appears.

The setting of the second version matters. Works and Days is largely advice about hard work, fair dealing and surviving a difficult agricultural life. Placed there, the jar story explains why people must toil for their living: before it was opened, the poem suggests, humans lived without heavy labour and sickness. Hesiod's attitude to women is openly hostile in places, which later readers have noted. Knowing the two versions helps you see that the myth was shaped to fit different purposes rather than existing in one fixed form.

The myth has a sequel. Pandora and Epimetheus had a daughter, Pyrrha, who married Deucalion, the son of Prometheus. In the version told most fully by the Roman poet Ovid, Zeus decided to destroy a wicked humanity with a great flood. Deucalion, warned by his father, built a vessel, and he and Pyrrha floated until the waters fell and they came to rest on a mountain, usually said to be Parnassus. They were the only humans left alive, a couple descended from both sides of the forethought and afterthought pairing.

Grieving and alone, they asked the gods how to restore humanity. The oracle told them to throw the bones of their mother behind them. Pyrrha was horrified, until Deucalion realised that their mother meant the Earth and her bones were stones. As they walked on and threw stones over their shoulders, those thrown by Deucalion became men and those thrown by Pyrrha became women. The story links the first woman's family to a fresh start for the human race, a hopeful turn for a line that began with a punishment.

Hesiod explains Pandora's name as all gifted, because every god gave her something. Grammatically, though, the Greek can also be read as all giving, and some scholars think the name once belonged to a generous earth goddess who sends gifts up from the ground. Support comes from a painted Athenian drinking cup of the fifth century BCE, now in the British Museum, which shows Athena and Hephaestus finishing a female figure labelled Anesidora, meaning she who sends up gifts. The scene matches Pandora's creation, which suggests the two names were connected.

If so, Hesiod may have reshaped an older, positive figure into the punishing first woman of his poems. Pandora also appeared on a prominent public monument. The ancient travel writer Pausanias records that the base of the great gold and ivory statue of Athena inside the Parthenon showed the birth of Pandora in relief. Later artists followed the mistranslation instead. Painters such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John William Waterhouse in the nineteenth century showed her holding or opening a decorated casket, which helped fix the image of a box in the modern imagination.

The jar in the myth was an ordinary object to Hesiod's audience. A pithos was a large clay storage jar, sometimes taller than a person, used for grain, oil and wine, and often partly sunk into the ground to keep its contents cool. Rows of them still stand in the storerooms of the Bronze Age palace at Knossos on Crete. They were big enough to climb into, and the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic was said to have lived in one in Athens. Later retellings turned his jar into a tub or a barrel, much as Pandora's jar became a box.

The names from the myth now circle Saturn. Prometheus and Pandora are two small moons discovered in 1980 in images from the Voyager 1 spacecraft. They orbit on either side of Saturn's narrow F ring, and their gravity helps keep its particles in place, which has earned them the name shepherd moons. Epimetheus has an even stranger arrangement. It shares almost the same orbit as another moon, Janus, and roughly every four years, as one catches up with the other, they swap places, the inner moon moving outwards and the outer one moving inwards.

Pandora's box was really a storage jar sent by Zeus as retaliation for the theft of fire, and the enduring puzzle of the myth is not what escaped but why hope alone remained inside.