What
Pandora let out and what she left in
{This
is a paper read at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the
Atlantic States on Oct. 6, 2006, except that updates to the material that
have occurred since then, up to 7/29/11, are given at the end, enclosed in curly
brackets. The bibliographical data for
these updates have also been added to the paper’s references.}
Hesiod’s
Works and Days says that the gods created the first woman Pandora as
punishment for Prometheus’s trickery and delivered her to men in the person of
his brother Epimetheus. My subject today is what the poem says happened next
to climax the story; namely, she opened a certain vessel. What I will do is
summarize the opinions of the commentators on what this action constituted.
I’ll avoid their actual arguments, but (the references note) the
people I’ll specifically mention, mostly writing in the past ten years, plus
two bibliographical references to the remainder.
Neither will I go over the text (which
is given with an English translation on the text page, with some
footnotes for the benefit of those interested in that sort of detail). In
summary, the account says that humanity had been free of evils, but Pandora
opened some jar in such a way that whatever were its contents did not remain,
and thereby caused woes. Only Elpis, meaning either Expectation or Hope, did
not emerge. Evils now afflict humanity, particularly diseases. Now whatever you
may have heard, the text does not specify just what escaped the jar. That must
be inferred, and of course the standard inference is that, to speak in popular
terms, “Pandora opened a box of evils to let them into the world, but left man
Hope.” That is, the evils cited in lines 91-92, or ‑93 if that verse is
authentic, were actually imprisoned in the vessel until Pandora let them out to
plague us as in 100-104. True, Hesiod speaks of a pithos, which was a
large jar, not a box. Dora and Erwin Panofsky, and now Immanuel Musäus,
have noted that we hear of a box today because the influential 16th
century figure Erasmus specified that type of container for certain reasons. But
either way, it is construed as having contained evils by most commentators, beginning
at least as early as the philosopher Philodemus of
Yet there is dissent.
It has arisen mostly out of wonder about what Hope was doing in a jar of evils.
(The Hesiod authority Solmsen, among others, even gave up on understanding the
text.) A sizeable body of critics feels that if the jar was a prison for evils
it must still be a prison for Elpis, so that she is kept away
from humanity, not preserved for it. This is the view of
Verdenius’s commentary, and since 1996 has been argued by Shannon Byrne,
Wilhelm Blümer, and most recently the art historian Jenifer Neils, if
again differing as to the character of Elpis, as well as whether she is Hope
or Expectation. The position may or may not be ancient, depending on how one
reads a cryptic statement by the Homer critic Aristarchus that I can go into
later if anyone wishes.
And some of us handle the Elpis
problem a different way, namely by denying that the other contents were evils.
Indeed, as Musäus and my review of his book discuss, there is reason to
believe that no one construed a jar of evils until Hellenistic times, after the
4th century B.C.E. Thus in 1989 I argued the contrary. Specifically,
I said the jar contained good spirits, resembling genies, which before
Pandora’s act were available to combat the evils cited in 91-92 or 93, considered
to already be in the world, but not after it. This idea is ancient.
Among others, in the 3rd century C.E. the fable collector Babrius
spoke of a pithos of useful entities, which when freed left for
Another way of proposing a jar of
good things is to say that they were material provisions, not spirits, which
Pandora disposed of in some way. This idea has no direct ancient attestation,
although Musäus suggests that it is presumed in a fragment of the
Hesiod-influenced Hellenistic poet Callimachus. It was first proposed directly
by Eduard Schwartz in 1915, and has now been endorsed by Musäus and
apparently Jens Holzhausen, and by Jakub Krajczynski and Wolfgang
Rösler in an article that just came out in July. These critics do differ
in an essential way. To Musäus and some others, Pandora simply spilled the
jar’s contents so that men’s livelihood was lost. The subsequent hunger then
allows formerly harmless diseases to attack. The retention of elpis
means that we hope for new provisions. But in an original, not to say
revolutionary contribution, Krajczynski and Rösler propose that Pandora
was the original housewife, who simply used the jar’s contents over a period of
time to keep Epimetheus’s household functioning, so that the myth explains
the origin of a household division of labor that was common with the Greeks.
The ills of lines 100-104 naturally come to the man who must labor to replenish
the pithos. As for elpis, these authors say that it is a figure
for a small amount of grain the wife leaves to be planted as seed. And for
them, seeds represent the hope for a good harvest, not a simple
expectation that it will happen.
Those are the written
interpretations. But our earliest surviving testimony to the overall narrative
is not literary, but archaeological. There are a small number of visual representations
of Pandora dating from the 5th century, B.C.E., whether or not the
Hesiodic version of her. Most of them deal with her origin, not the pithos,
but the slide {website viewers: see the vase painting reference in the references} shows a
vase that may include that. It was excavated over 200 years ago and there have
since been many interpretations, as is noted by Manfred Oppermann in the LIMC
catalogue. Nonetheless, the two figures on the left are now usually read as
Pandora rising from the earth and Epimetheus holding a mallet, respectively,
because there is a similar painting where those names are actually lettered
in. And to some scholars although not all, the right-most figure is the head of
Elpis protruding from the pithos. If so, who is the mature male next to
her, as opposed to the youth on the left? To my uneducated eye the one on the
left looks like a full sized Epimetheus receiving Pandora in his optimistic
youth; the one on the right also Epimetheus but in his later years, stunted
after the diseases of the myth have emaciated him, contemplating Elpis as all
he has left. However, the bona fide art historian Neils believes the details of
the iconography support the left hand male as Hephaestus, who formed Pandora
from earth; the right hand one as Zeus, who caused Elpis to be trapped; and the
pithos as made of metal, which she reads as a prison. If so, the artist
would be our earliest witness to a tradition of the jar imprisoning its
contents as opposed to storing them.
Now the debate over these construals
has been in process for two thousand years, and I have no elpis of
resolving it this morning. I only want to point out what one’s position on the
issue implies for the rest of Hesiod’s poem. I do this in the context that
while many in the 19th century thought the overall Works and Days
was incoherent, and while their tradition has retained some influence, scholars
in the last few years of the 20th and so far in the 21st have
tended to see coherence in the poem, although there is no consensus yet on
details. With this in mind I first ask those who hold that our text says Elpis
is kept away from humans if they can live with a conflict in the
poem between perceptions of so important a concept, not just as to whether it
is good or evil, where there has been much debate, but whether or not it exists.
Lines 498-500 {cited in the text page} say that a
farmer should not rely on elpis, but that many men do.
That is to say, it is present among humans, which is incompatible with
keeping it away from humans from the start. So if that is your
reading you should also agree with the 19th century that the poem is
incoherent.
And if you are in the majority who
believe the pithos imprisoned some things, namely evils, but now
preserves others, namely Elpis, you must also be willing to believe that Hesiod
could be so confused as to give the jar such a dual function. It is true that
some have acknow ledged the confusion, but they assign it less to Hesiod
himself than to the genre that for whatever reason he employs here. Thus West
states that “mythical jars … imprison evil … and conserve good.” But while
there are many cases in world folklore where a vessel serves his first purpose,
and others where one serves his second, I have found no case where one does
both. Or, Sánchez Ortiz assigns the problem to the inherent irrationality
of myth in general, but this conflates the irrationality that myth possesses at
an abstract level, whereby its logic is not that of science, with irrationality
at a concrete level, such as not grasping the simple function of everyday
objects. One might say that logical consistency should not be expected of a
poem with superstitious elements like the catalog of dark prohibitions near the
end of the “Works” portion. For example, lines 753-4 say that a woman’s
bathwater is bad for a man. But to illustrate my point, at least Hesiod does
not state that the tub holding that bathwater contains some type of pollution
that will infect a man, but also holds some other entity that it somehow keeps
away from him. Elsewhere in the poem the pithos in particular is simply
a storage jar.
So I claim that if you hold the
majority view, where Hesiod was inconsistent on what such a vessel was for, be
it from lack of care in treating the materials he inherited or otherwise, then
whether you admit it or not you are implying that he was muddleheaded.
I see no such inconsistencies
between the overall poem and the jar preserving either good spirits or material
provisions. So if you support either of these two interpretations you are free
to claim that the overall poem is coherent if that is your wont.
And that is what I believe can be
said about the narrative at present with some measure of authority. Thank you.
{Added 10/23/06: No one at the
meeting asked for amplification of the cryptic statement by Aristarchus, but
briefly the issue is as follows. He is said to have interpreted the
narrative so that the elpis “of good escaped, while that of evil remained”
in the jar. Verdenius interprets the second phrase as support for
his view that Elpis is evil and kept away from humanity. The problem
is that the scholiast who relays the opinion casts it as a response to the
opinion of Comanus cited in the previous paragraph, i.e., as if Aristarchus too
thought the jar preserved Elpis, pace Verdenius. But in turn,
the problem with that reading is that it assumes that humanity is characterized
by expectation of evil, whereas that idea is very un-Hesiodic (as the articles
of both Sánchez Ortiz and Lauriola document). So either
Aristarchus misinterpreted Hesiod or something is wrong with the report of his
view by the scholiast. Added 9/29/07: To
be sure, Chad Schroeder interprets the Comanus and Aristarchus statements (his
fragments 65 and 66, respectively, which are quoted, translated, and annotated
at the end of his dissertation) differently. He says that Comanus is
disagreeing with Hesiod that Elpis could be left in the jar, because it is
among humans, implying that Comanus thought the jar had previously kept it away
from humans, and that Aristarchus is only caviling that it is only the “hope”
of good things that is among humans by escaping. Schroeder could well be
correct and I not, especially since Aristarchus makes more sense in his
reading.}
{Added
9/19/07: The position that evils escaped the jar and that Hope is preserved is
also adopted by Liz Warman and (9/20/07) by Domenico Fasciano.}
{Added
4/17/08: As to deep
interpretations of the pithos, the avante garde scholar Vered Lev Kenaan
considers it emblematic of Pandora herself, in that that personage “embod[ies]
… the interplay between exteriority and interiority.” She also (5/9/08) suggests
that Erasmus’s mistake of “box” for “jar” nonetheless reveals “the inner connection
... between woman and the idea of a text.”}
{Added
1/23/08: Jonathan Zarecki has now substantially agreed with my 1989
interpretation.}
{Added
10/24/06: Holzhausen actually agrees with Musäus that elpis is the
hope for new provision, but anticipates Krajczynski and Rösler, in that he
says that Pandora’s deed was to “distribute” the provisions in the pithos
“in the role of housewife as manager of the household.”}
{Added
{Added
{Added 9/24/09: Benjamin Wolkow has
argued to some effect (citing evidence of what the “dog-like” mind that Hesiod
ascribes to Pandora would have meant to the Greeks) that, as against a common
understanding that her motive in opening the jar was simple curiosity, (Hesiod
means that) she opened it with the malicious intent of stealing the provisions
she thought it contained. Wolkow
implicitly assumes the conventional view of these contents, and says that
Pandora could have simply mistook them, but I would think his interpretation is
easier to accept if the vessel actually contained provisions.}
{Added 2/15/10: In her contribution
to the new Brill “Companion” volume Clay passes over the issue of whether or
not the jar contained evils (while referring to some of the studies from the
bibliography here
in a footnote), but adds a suggestive sentence to her earlier interpretation of
Elpis remaining in the jar to say that “the real counterpart to Hope is certain
knowledge of what will be.” Perhaps we might wonder what Elpis would
be like if she had gotten out.}
{Added 3/13/10: I did not take Daniel Ogden’s 1998
contribution seriously when I first wrote this paper, but since Clay also cites
it in the footnote just mentioned, I suppose it is time to account for it. Ogden seems to have a conventional view of
what was in the jar as Hesiod actually tells the story, but says that “what the
audience might have expected” to have been there was a “teras-baby,”
that is, a newborn with monstrous features necessitating leaving it to die by
exposure. He arrives at this conclusion
by considering attested Greek and Near East tales that are indeed like
this. And despite denying that this was
the actual story, either with Hesiod or before him, he thinks it relevant that
the poet elsewhere mentions the possibility of women having bad children, and
that some scholars interpret the jar allegorically as a womb.}
{Added 3/15/10: As part of a massive new Italian translation
of all of Hesiod, pseudo-Hesiod,
and the scholia to Hesiod, with introduction and notes, Cesare Cassanmagnago
gives a conventional understanding of our narrative, if with the matchless
formulation that to leave Elpis to humanity, so that we can think about the
future, constitutes magra consolazione, “cold comfort.”}
{Added 5/18/10: Catalina Aparicio Villalonga’s article in
Catalán on the Greek concept of the hetera (roughly “courtesan”)
has an appendix on Hesiod’s two first-woman myths, in Theogony and our
poem, respectively, which she combines into “the” myth of “Pandora” along with
most feminist Hesiod scholarship. She follows J. Castellano’s 1999
translations of the Greek into Catalán (which I have not seen), albeit
with “corrections,” with the result that her construal of the jar is conventional. She
makes no mention of the tradition that interprets the jar’s contents as goods
in her actual text (in spite of citing three titles from it in her
bibliography), but does revive the old idea, originally due to the 19th
century philosopher Schopenhauer, that Hesiod “mistook” an original story where
it contained them.}
{Added
10/5/10: Ernst-Richard Schwinge gives an
account of the jar within the general conception that it contained provisions,
not evils, while refining some points of this tradition. For example, he argues that the “other”
myriad cares (although some translate as “otherwise”) mentioned immediately
after we are told Elpis remains are not in addition to her, but to those
announced before the text states Pandora opened the jar; that is, the diseases
cited at the end of the story are different from the cares associated with
working to obtain the lost provisions.
Above all, he is concerned to show that leaving Elpis in the jar completes
the implementation of Zeus’s anger at Prometheus mentioned before the account
of the creation of Pandora: Elpis is an
evil because it is false expectation that humans will recover the lost means of
livelihood, even though they naturally think it good because it was in the jar
with them. In the process, Schwinge
displays a good critical grasp of the German literature and some of the
English, albeit he ignores a number of the works cited above.}
{Added
10/8/10: I have only just come upon Jan Bremmer’s discussion of
Pandora dating from 2000. He develops a new verson of the old idea
of her as “the Greek Eve,” and one which puts the overall Prometheus-Pandora
myth in the context of a throughly discussed genre of such stories in the
Ancient Near East. As to the jar, he thinks of it as definitely
containing evils as tradition has it (he characterizes some of those of the
contributions cited above that dispute this position as “not wholly
convincing,” and others of them as simply “unpersuasive,” without further
comment), but cannot give a definite interpretation of Elpis. He is
sympathetic to the old idea that she is the “expectation of evil,” as Verdenius
phrases it in the contribution cited above, but ultimately thinks the poet is
not clear because he “did not completely successfully integrate an existing
story with perhaps a different moral” into his account.}
{Added
11/8/10: I have now obtained access to the important 2006 collection
of Hesiod essays in modern Greek entitled Musaôn Archômetha
(“Let’s begin with the Muses,” the opening phrase of Hesiod’s Theogony);
Flora Manakidou’s contribution in particular includes a running commentary on Works
and Days. On our question here she takes for granted that evils
escaped the jar, as convention has it, and that the retention of Elpis means
that the quality (which she construes as “Expectation”) is available to humans.
(In a footnote purporting to summarize the literature, she misrepresents
Verdenius as asserting that the retention is bad, when he actually says that it
is meant as a concession by Zeus to prevent human life from being completely
unbearable, and does not notice that he believes it means humans are deprived
of expectation. Here she also observes that in 1963 Fritz Krafft, a
precursor of the more recent statements noted above -- which she ignores -- to
the effect that the jar contained provisions, stated that the retention keeps
expectation among the household goods, but does not notice that he said the
escaping entities were also part of them.) Her essential
contribution to the issue is probably to stress the essential ambiguity of the
retention to an even greater degree than do writers such as Arrighetti and
Nelson, especially by calling on citations in other Greek literature.
Thus she says for example that (I translate) “the obscurity shows
that it is in the judgment of the human to evaluate the quality of the
doubly-meaning Expectation and what it eventually signifies that it remains
with humans.” I take this to mean that the poet deliberately makes
the retention ambiguous.}
{Added
7/29/11: In the course of giving the most extensive line-by-line commentary
on Hesiod’s Works and Days to appear since West’s in 1978, Andrea Ercolani takes the jar
of our narrative to have contained evils. (As do many upholders of the conventional intepretation,
in his Italian translation of the poem earlier in the book he reads the grammatical object
of the verb “dispersed” in v. 94 to be the ills cited in 90-92 as having been far from humanity before Pandora.)
He does note some of the readings noted above whereby the jar contained provisions, simply saying
that they are unconvincing. As to Elpis, he reviews the three possibilities that elpis (lower-case, objecting to the
standard personification) is good, evil, or neutral or two-fold, respectively.
In the online addenda available from his publisher’s website
he adds mention of some other readings both of what was in the jar and of the character of elpis.
He does not rule definitively on that question (although he allows that Arrighetti’s idea that the retention of elpis
means that it is the only thing under human control is “very sensible”).}