Was Pandora’s box really a box?

A jar in Hesiod

The jar first appears in Hesiod, a Greek poet of about 700 BC, in his farming poem Works and Days. Zeus, angry over the stolen fire, has the gods build a woman and give her every gift, hence her name, Pandora. Hermes delivers her to Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus, who has forgotten the warning never to accept a present from Zeus. Then comes the famous moment:

But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door

Hesiod’s word is pithos. A pithos was a heavy clay jar for grain, oil or wine, sometimes as tall as a grown man and sunk partly into the floor. Rows of them still stand in the storerooms of the palace of Knossos on Crete. The philosopher Diogenes was said to have made his home in one (Diogenes Laertius 6.23).

Where the box came from

The box is usually credited to Erasmus of Rotterdam. In his Adagia, a book of Latin proverbs, he retold the story in 1508 to explain the saying Malo accepto stultus sapit, roughly, the fool grows wise once the harm is done. He called the container a pyxis, a small lidded box, and in his version it is Epimetheus who lifts the lid. The classicist M. L. West suggested that Erasmus was blending Pandora with the little box Psyche carries in Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Painters followed the Renaissance text rather than the Greek one, and the box stuck.

Who opened it, and what flew out

In Hesiod, Pandora opens it herself. He never says where the jar came from, and he never lists what was inside. He only shows the world before and after. Before, people lived free of evils, hard toil and sickness. After, “earth is full of evils and the sea is full,” and diseases roam by day and by night in silence, because Zeus took away their voices (Works and Days 90–104).

The same poet tells a shorter version in his Theogony, where the first woman has neither a name nor a jar. A later fable by Babrius turns the story inside out: the jar holds all good things, a foolish man opens it, the blessings fly back to the gods, and only hope is left (Babrius 58).

Why Hope stayed under the rim

Hesiod adds that the lid came down in time, “by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus” (Works and Days 98–99). What that means is still argued. One reading: Hope is the comfort humans keep. Another: it is a blessing shut away from us, or one more evil held in reserve. A third starts from the Greek word elpis, which can mean expectation, good or bad. Aeschylus’s Prometheus says he stopped mortals foreseeing their doom and “caused blind hopes to dwell within their breasts” (Prometheus Bound 250). Hesiod himself, later in the same poem, has no kind word for the empty hope of an idle man (Works and Days 498–501).

Hesiod is just as plain about where he puts the blame: on the first woman, and on women after her. That is his view. Many modern readers turn the question around and ask whether Pandora was the trap or the first one caught in it, and readers of Genesis often set her beside Eve.

What the phrase means today

To open Pandora’s box is to start something that lets loose a swarm of troubles nobody can put back. The idiom keeps Erasmus’s box, but the picture underneath is Hesiod’s: a big jar, a lid lifted once, and one thing left inside. Why Zeus sent her at all is the other half of the story: the punishment of Prometheus.