What Was Really in Pandora's Box? The Myth of the First Woman and Her Jar
Pandora's 'box' was really a large jar, and it held countless evils, with Hope left inside. The original Greek myth, the mistranslation, and what Hope means.
In the oldest version of the myth, Pandora's "box" was really a large jar, and it held "countless plagues" for humanity: when Pandora scattered its contents, the earth and sea became "full of evils". Only one thing stayed inside when the lid closed: Hope, in Greek Elpis. The word "box" came much later, from a translation mistake in the sixteenth century. So the short answer is "all the evils of the world, and hope", but each part of that answer has a story behind it.
Who was Pandora?
In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman, made by the smith god Hephaestus on the orders of Zeus. The earliest versions of her story come from the poet Hesiod, in two poems: the Theogony and Works and Days. Scholars describe the myth as a kind of theodicy, an answer to the old question of why there is evil in the world.
Her story starts with another myth. The Titan Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans. Zeus was angry and decided to give humanity a punishing "gift" in return. That gift was Pandora.
How the gods made her
In the Theogony, Zeus orders Hephaestus to mould the first woman out of earth. Athena dresses her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands and a crown. Hesiod calls her a "beautiful evil", and when gods and mortals first see her, "wonder seized them". In this poem she has no name at all.
Works and Days tells the more famous version and adds more gods to the work. Athena teaches her needlework and weaving, Aphrodite gives her grace and the power to stir painful longing, and Hermes gives her "a shameless mind and a deceitful nature", along with speech full of "lies and crafty words". Finally Hermes names her Pandora, "All-Gift", because every god on Olympus gave her something. The name sounds generous, but in Hesiod the gift is a trap.
Prometheus's warning and Epimetheus's mistake
Prometheus expected more revenge from Zeus, so he warned his brother Epimetheus never to accept a gift from him. Epimetheus did not listen. He accepted Pandora, and she promptly scattered the contents of her jar. Later mythographers made explicit what Hesiod only implies: Epimetheus married Pandora.
The names of the two brothers help the story. Prometheus is usually understood as "forethought" and Epimetheus as "afterthought": one thinks before acting, the other understands only when it is too late. Pandora's arrival is the moment when afterthought wins.
What was in the jar?
Hesiod says the jar contained "countless plagues". When it was opened, they flew out into the world, and that is why the land and sea are full of evils. Hesiod does not list every evil, but the point is clear: sickness, toil and suffering, which had not troubled humans before, now became part of human life.
One thing did not escape: Hope. Hesiod gives no reason why Hope stayed in the jar. He closes the episode with a grim moral: there is "no way to escape the will of Zeus".
From jar to box: a famous mistranslation
In Greek, the container is a pithos, a large storage jar often half-buried in the ground and used for wine, oil or grain; the word could also mean a funerary jar. The change to "box" is usually blamed on the sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam. When he retold Hesiod's tale in Latin, he translated pithos with pyxis, which means "box", and the inaccurate phrase "Pandora's box" has stuck ever since.
The difference matters for how we picture the scene. A small box you open out of curiosity feels like a personal mistake. A great storage jar sunk in the ground feels more like a storeroom of the world's troubles.
Why did Hope stay inside?
Because Hesiod never explains it, readers have argued about Hope for centuries. One reading says Hope stayed with humans as comfort: whatever evils fill the world, people still have hope. Another reading notes that the jar was full of evils, so Hope might be one of them, a false expectation that keeps people suffering.
There is also an older tradition in which the jar held good things. Before the Renaissance, the container was said to have held "blessings" for humanity. The scholar M. L. West argued that the story comes from a myth older than Hesiod, in which the jar may once have contained only good things, and that this explains why Hesiod's version feels confused and unfinished.
Was Pandora once a goddess?
Some evidence suggests that Pandora was not always a villain. Her name can mean "all-giving" rather than "all-gifted". On a white-ground cup in the British Museum, painted around 460 BC, the figure of the first woman is labelled Anesidora, "she who sends up gifts", a title more often used for earth goddesses such as Gaia or Demeter. Some classicists think Hesiod reversed the meaning of a name that once belonged to a generous earth goddess.
The scholar Jane Ellen Harrison pointed to a vase in the Ashmolean Museum that shows Pandora rising from the ground with her arms raised to greet Epimetheus. In Harrison's reading, she is the Earth, giver of all gifts.
What happened to Pandora afterwards?
Later writers added an ending. Pandora and Epimetheus had a daughter, Pyrrha, who married Deucalion and survived the great flood with him. It has also been argued that Hesiod's version shaped later Jewish and Christian thought and kept Pandora's bad reputation alive into the Renaissance, when poets, playwrights, painters and sculptors made her a favourite subject.
Today "to open Pandora's box" means to start something that causes many unexpected problems. The myth behind it is stranger and richer than the idiom: a jar instead of a box, a gift that was a trap, and a single word, Hope, that no one has ever fully explained.
Learn with Pandora: English phrases
| Phrase | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| to open Pandora's box | to start something that causes many problems | Changing the rules could open Pandora's box. |
| curiosity killed the cat | being too curious can get you into trouble | Don't read that letter; curiosity killed the cat. |
| a poisoned chalice | something attractive that brings trouble | The promotion turned out to be a poisoned chalice. |
| with hindsight | understanding something after it happens | With hindsight, I should have said no. |
| hope springs eternal | people keep hoping even when it seems useless | My team always loses, but hope springs eternal. |
Try this: Write three English sentences about a decision that caused more problems than you expected, using "open Pandora's box" and "with hindsight".