Pandora's Jar
About this book
Pandora did not originally open a box, Medusa was not always the creature modern viewers recognize, and Helen's responsibility for Troy changes with the teller. Natalie Haynes returns to ancient sources to examine how familiar summaries flatten unstable and contradictory traditions.
The essays consider Pandora, Jocasta, Helen, Medusa, the Amazons, Clytemnestra, Eurydice, Phaedra, Medea, and Penelope. Each chapter moves beyond a recovered original into reception history, tracing how art, drama, scholarship, children's stories, and popular culture repeatedly remake the figure under discussion.
Pandora's Jar is not a catalogue of misunderstood heroines made uniformly virtuous. It is an argument for reading versions closely: who speaks, what a culture fears, and why the story of a woman blamed or silenced can change even when her name remains the same.
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Introduction
WHEN HARRY HAMLIN STOOD BEHIND A PILLAR IN THE DARKNESS OF Medusa’s lair in the Ray Harryhausen film Clash of the Titans, flames flickering off his shield, his face glistening with sweat, my brother and I were transfixed. Perseus holds the shield in front of his eyes to protect himself from Medusa’s stony gaze. He watches the reflection of a slithering monster, outlined in front of the fire behind him. This Medusa has a lashing, snakish tail as well as the traditional snakes for hair. She is armed with a bow and arrows, and can knock one of Perseus’ comrades off his feet with a single hit. As the man sprawls on the ground, she glides forward into the light. Suddenly her eyes flash bright green. He is turned to stone where he lies.
Medusa fires another arrow, this time taking Perseus’ shield out of his hands. Her rattlesnake tail quivers in anticipation of the kill. Perseus tries to catch her reflection in the glinting blade of his sword as she nocks a third arrow. Medusa inches closer as Perseus waits, turning his sword in his hand. The sweat has formed beads across his upper lip. At the crucial moment, he swings his arm and decapitates her. Her body writhes before thick red blood seeps out from her neck. When it reaches his shield, there is a hissing sound as it corrodes the metal.
This film – along with Jason and the Argonauts – was a staple of my childhood viewing: it was a rare school holiday when one of them wasn’t on TV. It did not occur to me that there was anything unusual about the depiction of Medusa, because she wasn’t a character, she was just a monster. Who feels sorry for a creature who has snakes for hair, and turns innocent men to stone?
I would go on to study Greek at school because of these films, and probably also because of the children’s versions of Greek myths I had read (a Puffin edition, I think, by Roger Lancelyn Green. My brother tells me we had a Norse one too). It would be years before I came across any other version of Medusa’s story, anything that told me how she became a monster, or why. During my degree, I kept coming across details in the work of ancient authors which were quite different from the versions I knew from simplified stories I’d read and watched. Medusa wasn’t always a monster, Helen of Troy wasn’t always an adulterer, Pandora wasn’t ever a villain. Even characters that were outright villainous – Medea, Clytemnestra, Phaedra – were often far more nuanced than they first appeared. In my final year at college, I wrote my dissertation on women who kill children in Greek tragedy.
I have spent the last few years writing novels which tell stories from Greek myth that have largely been forgotten. Female characters were often central figures in ancient versions of these stories. The playwright Euripides wrote eight tragedies about the Trojan War which survive to us today. One of them, Orestes, has a male title character. The other seven have women as their titles: Andromache, Electra, Hecabe, Helen, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia Among the Taureans and The Trojan Women. When I began hunting out the stories I wanted to tell, I felt exactly like Perseus in the Harryhausen movie: squinting at reflections in the half-light. These women were hiding in plain sight, in the pages of Ovid and Euripides. They were painted on vases which are held in museums all over the world. They were in fragments of lost poems, and broken statues. But they were there.
It was, however, while debating the character of a non-Greek woman that I decided to write this book. I was on Radio 3, discussing the role of Dido, the Phoenician queen who founded the city of Carthage. To me, Dido was a tragic heroine, self-denying, courageous, heartbroken. To my interviewer, she was a vicious schemer. I was responding to her in Virgil’s Aeneid, he was responding to her in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. I’d spent so long thinking about ancient sources I’d forgotten that most people get their classics from much more modern sources (Marlowe is modern to classicists). Dismal though I think the film Troy to be, for example, it has probably been seen by more people than have read the Iliad.
So I decided I would choose ten women whose stories have been told and retold – in paintings, plays, films, operas, musicals and more – and I would show how differently they were viewed in the ancient world. How major female characters in Ovid would become non-existent Hollywood wives in twenty-first-century cinema. How artists would recreate Helen to reflect the ideals of beauty of their own time, and we would lose track of the clever, funny, sometimes frightening woman that she is in Homer and Euripides. And how some modern writers and artists were finding these women, just like I was, and putting them back at the heart of the story.
Every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards. Myths may be the home of the miraculous, but they are also mirrors of us. Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth. We have made space in our storytelling to rediscover women who have been lost or forgotten. They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people.
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WHEN WE THINK OF PANDORA, WE PROBABLY HAVE A PICTURE in our minds. She holds a box in her hands, or she’s sitting beside one. She is opening it either because she is curious to see what’s inside, or because she knows what it contains and wants to let it out. Its contents are abstract but terrible: all the evils in the world are now set loose upon us. And, gratifyingly, we know exactly who to blame: the beautiful woman who couldn’t leave well alone.
It’s obviously a story which finds its echoes with Eve. Do what you like in Eden, Adam is told by God. Eat from any of the trees. Except that one, the tree of knowledge, which is nonetheless placed in easy reach, next to this persuasive talking snake. Eve is then created, but God doesn’t tell her what she can and can’t eat. She has presumably heard it from Adam, though, because she knows what to say when the snake (whom God has also created) asks her if she can’t eat from any of the trees in the garden. Yes, Eve replies, we can. Just not that one or we’ll die. The knowledge tree? asks the snake. No, you won’t die. You’ll just be able to tell good from evil, like God. Eve shares the fruit with Adam, who was with her, as the book of Genesis tells us. And the snake is right: they don’t die, though Eve is promised agonizing childbirth as her reward for heeding the snake for whose existence and voice God was entirely responsible.
But Pandora has been particularly ill-served by history, even relative to Eve. Eve did at least listen to the snake and eat the thing she’d been told was dangerous. Pandora did not open a box, either from curiosity or malevolence. Indeed the box doesn’t appear in her story until Hesiod’s Works and Days was translated into Latin by Erasmus, in the sixteenth century, well over two millennia after Hesiod was writing in Greek. Erasmus was looking for a word to convey the Greek pithos, meaning ‘jar’. As the classical scholar and translator M. L. West describes,1 Hesiod meant a ceramic storage jar, a metre or so tall. Greek jars are narrow at the base, broadening out to a wide lip. They are not especially stable: look in any museum of classical antiquities and you will see the many cracks and repairs which reveal their intrinsic fragility. Ceramic pots are often beautiful, ornately decorated works of art. But they are not where one would necessarily choose to store a set of evils that will cause mankind untold griefs for millennia to come. Quite aside from anything else – as anyone who has ever swept a kitchen floor will cheerlessly testify – lids aren’t always tightly fastened. And we have the advantage of screw-tops, something Pandora assuredly did not.
West conjectures that Erasmus confused the stories of Pandora and Psyche (another character from Greek myth who does carry a box – puxos, more usually transliterated as pyxis – when she is sent to the Underworld on a quest). It’s certainly a plausible theory. So did Erasmus confuse the two women – Pandora and Psyche – or confuse the two similar-sounding words: jar – pithos, and box – puxos (in Greek; pyxis in Latin)? Either way, the loser is Pandora. Because, while it might take effort to open a box, it’s much easier to knock a lid off or smash a top-heavy ceramic jar. And yet the linguistically doctored image of Pandora opening a box with malice aforethought is the one which has entered our culture.
Look at artistic representations of her which pre-date the widespread reading of Erasmus (who died in 1536) and she is shown with a jar, even if the painter is seeking to cast her as a villain and the image reflects that. Jean Cousin painted her as Eva Prima Pandora,2 a blend of Pandora and Eve, around 1550: lying naked, save for a sheet curled between her legs, jar under one hand, human skull under the other. And there are later paintings which also show her with a jar: Henry Howard’s The Opening of Pandora’s Vase3 in 1834, for example. But the most famous image of her is perhaps from some forty years later, by which time Erasmus’ rewrite seems firmly embedded in the collective artistic consciousness.
In 1871, Rossetti completed his portrait of Pandora holding a small golden casket in her hands. The lid of the casket is studded with large jewels, green and purple, which are echoed by the ornate stones in one of the bracelets she wears on her right wrist. The long, slender fingers of her right hand are flexed as she begins to open the box. Her left hand grips the base firmly. The crack opening between the lid and the box itself is just a thin shadow, but already a coil of orange smoke emanates: it is twisting its way behind Pandora’s red-brown curls. We don’t know what is in the box exactly, but whatever it is, it’s sinister. Look at the side of the box more closely, just above Pandora’s left thumb, and a Latin inscription makes things appear less promising still: ‘Nascitur Ignescitur’4 – born in flames. Rossetti made the casket himself, but it has subsequently been lost.
The portrait is well over a metre tall, and its depth of colour is as fiery as the text at its centre: Pandora wears a crimson dress, which drapes over her arms and body from its high round neckline. Her lips are painted in a perfect bow in the same bright red. A tiny shadow under the centre of her mouth creates the impression that her lower lip protrudes towards the viewer. Her huge blue eyes gaze unapologetically at us. The model was Jane Morris, wife of the artist William, with whom Rossetti had been having what we can reasonably conclude was a thrilling affair. Critics asked themselves what William Morris might think of a work showing his wife in such an undeniably erotic light, painted by another man. Fewer people thought to ask how Jane Morris must have felt to see herself illustrating the description of Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony as kalon kakon5 – a beautiful evil. And no one asked what Pandora might have thought of the object she was holding so tightly, so dangerously in her beautiful hands.
Perhaps, then, it’s time to look at Pandora’s story from the beginning, and see how it evolves and how she changes from one writer and artist to the next. As is so often the way with excellent things, we need to go back to the Greeks to see how it began. The earliest source we have is Hesiod, who lived in the late eighth century BCE in Boeotia in central Greece. He tells her story twice, the first time relatively briefly in his poem Theogony.
This poem is an origin story which catalogues the genealogy of the gods. First comes Chaos, then Earth, then the Underworld, and perhaps the first character we might recognize: Eros, who softens flesh and overcomes reason. Chaos creates Erebus and Night, Night creates Air and Day, Earth creates Heaven, and so on. Two generations on, we get to Zeus: Heaven (Ouranos) and Earth (Gaia) have multiple children including Kronos and Rhea. Ouranos turns out to be less than ideal parent material, hiding his children away in a cavern and refusing to let them out into the light. To win freedom from their oppression, Kronos eventually castrates his father with a sharp hook given to him by his mother, and throws the disembodied genitals into the sea (which is what creates Aphrodite. This is probably the time to start pondering whether Freud might have something to say about any of this). Kronos and Rhea in turn have multiple children: these pre-Olympian gods are known as Titans. Then Kronos also fails a basic fatherhood test, choosing to swallow each of his offspring whole. Rhea gives birth to Zeus in secret so he won’t be eaten, then Zeus forces Kronos to regurgitate his older siblings and takes over the mantle of king of the gods for himself. It scarcely needs saying that family gatherings must have been fraught affairs.
Zeus is often described as clever and strategic, but he is soon thwarted twice by the wily Titan Prometheus. Hesiod is obviously looking for a story that explains why his fellow Greeks sacrifice the bones of an animal to the gods, and keep the choice cuts of meat for themselves. Given that sacrifice should presumably involve the loss of something good, and given that the bones are not the best bit of a dead ox, an explanation is required. So Hesiod tells us that, at a place called Mekone, Prometheus performed some sleight of hand. Given the task of dividing meat into a portion for the gods and one for mortals, he hides the meat beneath the ox’s stomach and offers it to Zeus, and arranges the bones for men under a piece of glistening fat. Zeus complains that his portion looks the less appetizing and Prometheus explains that Zeus has first pick, so should choose whichever portion he prefers. The king of the gods makes his choice and only afterwards sees that he has been deceived: mortals get the good stuff and the gods are stuck with a pile of bones.
Prometheus’ second piece of trickery is outright theft: he steals fire (which belongs to the gods) and shares it with mortals. He is famously punished for this by being tied to a rock and having his liver pecked out by an eagle. His immortality means that his liver grows back, so the whole grisly business can begin anew each day. Zeus is so incensed by the improvement in mortal lives which fire has brought that he decides to give us an evil (kakon)6 to balance things out. He gets Hephaestus to mould from the earth the likeness of a young woman. The goddess Athene dresses the unnamed maiden in silver clothes and gives her a veil and a golden crown, decorated with images of wild animals. When Hephaestus and Athene have finished their work, they show the kalon kakon, ant’agathoio7 – beautiful evil, the price of good – to the other gods, who realize that mortal men will have no device or remedy against her. From this woman, Hesiod says, comes the whole deadly race of women. Always nice to be wanted.
For a story which is told in so few words, this takes a lot of unpacking. Firstly, why doesn’t Hesiod use Pandora’s name? Secondly, is Hesiod really saying that women are a separate race from men? In which case, Pandora is very different from Eve: Adam and Eve will be the ancestors of all future men and women alike, but Pandora will be the antecedent of women alone. Thirdly, where’s her jar, or box, or whatever? Again, we’ll have to wait for Hesiod’s second, longer version to find out more. And fourthly, what do we find out about Pandora herself? She’s autochthonous, i.e. made of the earth itself. She’s designed and created by the gods’ master craftsman, Hephaestus, and decorated by the cunning and skilled Athene. We know Pandora is beautiful. But what is she actually like? We get only one phrase which might tell us, before Hesiod gets side-tracked explaining how women will only want you if you aren’t poor, and comparing them unfavourably to bees. As Pandora is taken out to be shown to the other gods, who will marvel at how perfectly made she is, she delights in her dress – kosmo agalomenēn.8 It’s as though Hesiod has been charmed by this young woman, even as he is describing her as evil and deadly. Just created, and she’s taking innocent pleasure in having been given a pretty frock.
Hesiod’s second, more detailed version of the story is in Works and Days. This poem is largely written as a rebuke to his indolent brother, Perses, proving that the poet’s passive-aggression isn’t limited to women. Siblings are also in his hexametric firing line. Once again, Zeus is angered by Prometheus’ theft, exclaiming ‘I will give them an evil as the price of fire’ – ‘anti puros dōsō kakon’. He goes on to say that Pandora will be an evil ‘in which all men will delight, and which they will all embrace.’9 Again, he orders Hephaestus to do the hard work of creating; Pandora will be made from earth and water and given human voice and strength, but she will have the face and form of an immortal goddess. Athene is charged with teaching her to weave and Aphrodite must give her golden grace, painful desire and limb-gnawing sufferings (these latter two characteristics are presumably the feelings Pandora will provoke in men, but they are integral to her very being).
The gods rush to do Zeus’ bidding. Indeed, more gods get involved: the Graces, Persuasion and the Hours all help with golden and floral decorations. The god Hermes gives her a doglike mind (this isn’t a compliment: the Greeks didn’t love dogs in the way that we do) and a dishonest nature. He is also responsible for both her voice and her name: ‘he called the woman Pandora, because all the gods who live on Mount Olympus gave her a gift, a calamity to men.’10 It is also Hermes, as the messenger of the gods, who takes Pandora away from the immortal realm and delivers her to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, as a gift. Prometheus (whose name literally means ‘foresight’) had warned his brother not to accept any gifts from Zeus. Epimetheus’ name means ‘hindsight’, and perhaps this is why he forgets that a present from Zeus might be something other than a box tied up with ribbon. So Epimetheus receives Pandora and the carefree life of mortals is at an end. Before this point, Hesiod explains, men had lived on the earth free from evils, free from hard work and from disease. But once Pandora takes the huge lid off her jar, that is all over, and mournful cares are now spread among mortals. Only Hope (Elpis)11 remains inside, retained under the lip of the jar, her unbroken home.
This longer version of Pandora’s beginnings answers some questions and raises several more. Pandora is a gift – literally: she is given by Hermes to Epimetheus. She is also all-gifted, insofar as many gods have contributed to her creation, giving her different qualities and skills. This part of her story perhaps reminds us of Sleeping Beauty, in which a baby is granted various positive qualities by invited fairies before a malevolent gatecrasher throws a spanner in the works by gifting her the prospect of death by spindle (commuted to an enormously long nap). But Pandora isn’t a baby when she receives these gifts, she is a parthenos: a maiden, a young woman of marriageable age. So these are not future qualities being bestowed on her, but immediately visible, audible ones: a voice, a dress, skill at weaving. There is a temptation to read her name as meaning ‘all-gifted’ (pan – ‘all’, dora comes from the verb didomi – ‘I give’). But the verb in Pandora’s name is active, not passive: literally she is all-giving rather than all-gifted. As an adjective in Greek, pandora is usually used to describe the earth, the all-giving thing which sustains life. There is an Athenian kylix (a wine cup) from around 460 BCE, attributed to the Tarquinia Painter, which is now in the British Museum and which appears to depict the scene Hesiod describes. The figures of Athene and Hephaestus stand to either side of a stiff Pandora, still seemingly more clay than woman. She is becoming a parthenos, but she is not yet finished, like a doll being dressed up by the skilful hands of the gods. Her name on this pot is given as Anesidora, meaning ‘she who sends up gifts’, much as the earth sends up the shoots of plants which will feed us and our livestock. So Pandora’s intrinsic generosity is erased if we think of her only as gifted.
But is she all-giving of anything we actually want? Or does she just dole out the contents of her jar? Hard work, grievous cares, disease and the like? In which case her name might best be read ironically: thanks for all the trauma you’re gifting us. It’s curious that Hesiod goes to such lengths to describe the creation of Pandora (right down to the spring flowers put in her hair), but the first we hear about the massive jar she is carrying is when she takes the lid off it after she is sent to Epimetheus. It’s hard to imagine she’s picked it up somewhere on her way down from Olympus with Hermes. Rather, it seems that Zeus’ punishment for men is twofold: the cunning, unavoidable Pandora herself, and the jar of nasties which he sends with her. After all, he is punishing a two-pronged attack on his divine dignity (the trick Prometheus pulled with the sacrificial meat and the theft of fire), so a double revenge seems appropriate. In which case, again, we might begin to wonder why Pandora receives all the blame. Look at the number of gods and Titans involved in this myth: Prometheus antagonizes Zeus but does give us fire and tries his best to warn Epimetheus about possible retribution. Epimetheus simply ignores or forgets what his brother had warned him about accepting gifts from Zeus, so we can surely lay some of the blame at his door. If he’d been more astute, Pandora would have been sent packing, jar and all, back to Olympus. Or do we give Epimetheus a pass because Zeus is after all the most powerful Olympian god and there isn’t much a Titan can do in a battle of wits with him, especially if he’s employing all the other gods to help him create and deliver Pandora? But then, why don’t we extend the same courtesy to Pandora? She is the mechanism by which Zeus decides to take his revenge, so how much agency does she really have? Stand up to Zeus and your best-case scenario is being struck by lightning and obliterated. Worst-case scenario is having your liver pecked out every day for eternity. It is hard to shake the sense that Hesiod has two pet peeves – conniving women and hapless brothers – and has told us this story in such a way that it contains one of each. But do we really think Pandora should have declined to accompany Hermes, or sat on top of her jar and refused to budge so it couldn’t be opened? Does she even know what’s inside? Hesiod is keen to tell us of her treacherous, deceitful nature (implanted by Hermes), but we see no indication of that. And, incidentally, Hermes seems to walk away from the whole saga without carrying any blame either.
Hesiod raises one last conundrum when he tells us that Elpis – Hope – remains beneath the lip of the jar. Is this a good thing for mortal men, or a bad one? Do we think Hope is being saved for us inside the jar? Or is it being withheld from us? All the evils which were inside are now out in the world, so would we be in better shape if Hope travelled among them? At least then we might have some positivity to raise our spirits (obviously, this doesn’t work if, like John Cleese in Clockwise, we ‘can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand’). Is Pandora committing one more act of petulant cruelty by making our lives miserable and then depriving us even of Hope? Or is the jar a safe place, where we know we will always have Hope, as we traverse a world which is now so much more frightening than it was before the jar was opened? Scholars have been divided on their reading of this passage, not least because, although elpis is usually translated as ‘hope’, it doesn’t quite mean that. Hope is intrinsically positive in English, but in Greek (and the same with the Latin equivalent, spes) it is not. Since it really means the anticipation of something good or bad, a more accurate translation would probably be ‘expectation’. Before we can worry about whether it’s advantageous to us that it remains in the jar, we first have to decide if it is intrinsically good or bad. This is a genuinely complex linguistic and philosophical puzzle. No wonder it’s easier to just blame Pandora.
And plenty of writers have done exactly that. In Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes, first published by Puffin in 1958 and many people’s first encounter with Pandora, she is roundly stitched up. Not only does she open the casket (which she has been told is full of treasure) while Epimetheus is out, but she ‘crept quietly’ to do so: she is malevolent and secretive because she knows she is in the wrong. In the most recent Puffin edition, this scene is excerpted inside the front cover for maximum impact. And in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls, which have similarly been the gateway to classics for many children since their publication in 1853, Pandora is even less generously treated. Her story is foreshadowed at the end of the previous chapter, in which she is introduced as ‘a sad naughty child’ (which coincidentally describes the background of anyone I have ever wanted to know).
Hawthorne’s next chapter, ‘The Paradise of Children’, begins by introducing us to Epimetheus as a child. So that he would not be lonely, ‘another child, fatherless and motherless like himself, was sent from a far country, to live with him, and be his playfellow and helpmate. Her name was Pandora. The first thing that Pandora saw, when she entered the cottage where Epimetheus dwelt, was a great box. And almost the first question which she put to him, after crossing the threshold, was this, “Epimetheus, what have you in that box?”’
So far, so bad. Pandora ‘was sent’, but we aren’t told by whom. The passive voice is a tremendous aid in avoiding responsibility (think of all those non-apologies which employ the formulation ‘I’m sorry if any feelings were hurt’. So much less effort than actively apologizing for having hurt someone’s feelings. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you’ can be heartfelt and sincere. ‘I’m sorry you were hurt’ is a reason to boot someone out of your life and never see them again). Zeus, Hephaestus, Athene and Hermes couldn’t find a more helpful alibi than Hawthorne here provides for them. Unnamed, unmentioned: their role in Pandora’s creation, let alone her arrival at Epimetheus’ cottage, is whitewashed from the story. Pandora’s interest in the large, mysterious casket is immediate and ongoing: she and Epimetheus fall out over it. She demands to know where it has come from, Epimetheus remembers it was delivered by a man Pandora can identify as Quicksilver (a cute pun, since quicksilver is another name for the metal, mercury, which is in turn the Roman name for Hermes). Hawthorne consistently loads his narrative against her: Epimetheus says things, Pandora – often using the same words – cries pettishly. His irritation is an expression of fatigue, hers of naughtiness. She is to blame for wilfully opening the box, Epimetheus is an accessory at most: ‘But – and you may see by this how a wrong act of any one mortal is a calamity to the whole world – by Pandora’s lifting the lid of that miserable box, and by the fault of Epimetheus, too, in not preventing her, these Troubles have obtained a foothold among us.’ The story is accompanied by not one but two illustrations of Pandora and the box, which is large enough for her to sit on. Again, we are invited to see Pandora’s unquenchable curiosity as a sin for which we all must pay.
Both these writers have made choices which reflect the times in which they were working rather than anything we might find in ancient versions of the myth. Myths – Greek ones perhaps especially so – are protean. As mentioned above, they operate in at least two timelines: the one in which they are ostensibly set, and the one in which any particular version is written. The condescending, paternalistic tone in Hawthorne’s version of Pandora is far more overt than the irritable misogyny we find in Hesiod. Hesiod may present Pandora as a trick, a construct made by the gods to bring harm to men, but he wants us to know about the reasons Zeus orders her creation, the revenge on Prometheus and the rest. In simplifying the stories for children, Green and Hawthorne both oversimplify, so that Pandora becomes more villainous than even Hesiod intended.