vessel

Pandora's Box

By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.

Description

A pithos, not a box

Hesiod's Works and Days (and a shorter notice in the Theogony) has Hephaestus shape Pandora; the gods load a jar — a pithos — with evils as payback for Prometheus's theft of fire. She opens it. Elpis, hope or expectation, stays under the lid. Erasmus's Renaissance pyxis ("box") is a translation habit that stuck in English. The poem is bitter anthropology, the making of the first woman in Hesiod's account, not a cult charter. There is no temple of the jar and no surviving vessel claimed as hers.

Primary Sources

“The woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these sorrows for men. Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home under the rim.”
Hesiod, Works and Days(c. 700 BCE)

Powers & Abilities

Evil ContainmentHope PreservationCurse Distribution