Greek Pantheonvessel
Pandora's Box
- Evil Containment
- Hope Preservation
- Curse Distribution
The infamous pithos given to Pandora by Zeus, containing all the evils of the world. When opened, it released sickness, death, and countless other plagues upon humanity, leaving only hope trapped inside.
About Pandora's Box
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.
Origin
Created by Hephaestus and filled by the gods as punishment for Prometheus's theft of fire.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Hesiod, Works and Days
About this entry
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.
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