On the floor of Jove’s palace there stand two urns, the one filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones. There were alternative accounts of jars or urns containing blessings and evils bestowed upon humanity in Greek myth, of which a very early account is related in Homer’s Iliad: In his version the box is opened by Epimetheus, whose name means ‘Afterthought’ – or as Hesiod comments, “he whom mistakes made wise”. The context in which the story appeared was Erasmus’ collection of proverbs, the Adagia (1508), in illustration of the Latin saying Malo accepto stultus sapit (from experiencing trouble a fool is made wise). The mistranslation of pithos is usually attributed to the 16th century humanist Erasmus who, in his Latin account of the story of Pandora, changed the Greek pithos to pyxis, meaning “box”. Photo by Jastrow, British Museum, Wikimedia Commons Etymology of the ‘Box’Īn Attic pyxis, 440–430 BCE. A modern, more colloquial equivalent is “to open a can of worms”. įrom this story has grown the idiom “to open a Pandora’s box”, meaning to do or start something that will cause many unforeseen problems. Though she hastened to close the container, only one thing was left behind – usually translated as Hope, though it could also have the pessimistic meaning of “deceptive expectation”. Pandora opened a jar left in her care containing sickness, death and many other unspecified evils which were then released into the world. Īccording to Hesiod, when Prometheus stole fire from heaven, Zeus, the king of the gods, took vengeance by presenting Pandora to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus. In modern times an idiom has grown from the story meaning “Any source of great and unexpected troubles”, or alternatively “A present which seems valuable but which in reality is a curse”. The container mentioned in the original account was actually a large storage jar, but the word was later mistranslated. Later depictions of the story have been varied, while some literary and artistic treatments have focused more on the contents than on Pandora herself. He reported that curiosity led her to open a container left in care of her husband, thus releasing physical and emotional curses upon mankind. Pandora’s box is an artifact in Greek mythology connected with the myth of Pandora in Hesiod’s Works and Days. Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s water-color of an ambivalent Pandora, 1881.
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