Pandora Never Had a Box

The story as it is told

Pandora, the first woman, was given a small box and told never to open it. In pictures it is often a jewelled casket.

She held out for as long as she could, but curiosity won. She lifted the lid, and every evil in the world flew out. Only Hope was left inside, at the bottom. That is why, ever since, to "open Pandora's box" has meant starting something you cannot undo.

What we can confirm

Hesiod's container is a storage jar. The oldest full telling is Hesiod's Works and Days). The Greek reads "ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμʼ ἀφελοῦσα": the woman, with her hands, lifted off the great lid of the pithos. Hope stays "ἔνδον... πίθου ὑπὸ χείλεσιν," inside under the rim of the jar. Hugh G. Evelyn-White's 1914 translation gives: "the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these," and "Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar." Evelyn-White hedged in a footnote, calling it "The jar or casket."

A pithos was an everyday object. In the same poem Hesiod uses the same word for ordinary storage jars on the farm. His calendar advice includes "ἀρχομένου δὲ πίθου καὶ λήγοντος κορέσασθαι" (take your fill when the jar is first opened and when it's nearly done) and "τετράδι δʼ οἶγε πίθον" (on the fourth day open a jar). Evelyn-White renders the latter "On the fourth day open a jar." Pandora's container is the farmhouse wine-and-grain jar of Hesiod's own audience.

In the Theogony there's no container at all. Hesiod's other version (Theogony, ll. 570 to 612) tells of the first woman, made as "the beautiful evil to be the price for the blessing" and called "sheer guile, not to be withstood by men" (Evelyn-White). She isn't named Pandora there, and no jar appears: the word "jar" doesn't occur in that passage of the 1914 translation.

Erasmus's pyxis. Erasmus retells the story in his Adagia. The passage is already in the September 1508 Venice edition printed by Aldus Manutius (the University of Basel copy) under the proverb "Malo accepto stultus sapit" (I.i.31, roughly "a fool learns from the harm he suffers"). His Latin reads: Jupiter sends Pandora to Prometheus "cum pyxide pulcherrima quidem illa, sed intus omne calamitatum genus occulente" ("with a box, very beautiful indeed, but hiding inside every kind of calamity"). Prometheus refuses it, and Pandora then "pyxidem donat" (gives the box) to Epimetheus. When he opens it and the diseases fly out, he learns too late. Erasmus also changed the cast: Hesiod has the woman lift the lid, while Erasmus has Epimetheus open it.

Where Erasmus may have gotten a box. A pyxis is a small lidded box or casket. The most famous box in Latin myth is Psyche's, in Apuleius's Metamorphoses (the Golden Ass): Venus sends Psyche to the underworld with a box for Proserpina's beauty, Psyche opens it against orders, and a deadly sleep comes out. In William Adlington's 1566 English: "shee opened the boxe where she could perceive no beauty nor any thing else, save onely an infernall and deadly sleepe." Art historians Dora and Erwin Panofsky's Pandora's Box (1956) is the standard study of how the box took over Pandora imagery; the suggestion that Erasmus blended Pandora with Psyche is widely attributed to that book.

The facts

• Hesiod, Works and Days: πίθου μέγα πῶμα, the "great lid of the jar" (Greek text, Perseus canonical XML)
• Hope stays "under the rim of the great jar" (Evelyn-White 1914)
• Hesiod uses πίθος elsewhere in the poem for ordinary storage jars ("On the fourth day open a jar")
• Evelyn-White's 1914 footnote: "The jar or casket contained the gifts of the gods"
• Erasmus, Adagia I.i.31: "cum pyxide pulcherrima," then "pyxidem donat"
• In Erasmus, Epimetheus opens the box
• Apuleius/Adlington: Psyche opens a forbidden box containing deadly sleep
• Erasmus mentions the jar story twice. Under "Aegroto dum anima est spes est" (1508 no. CCCXV; 1520 Chiliad II, Century IV) he adds: "Eodem pertinet fabula de Pandorae pixide in cuius summo labro sola spes haeserit" (the fable of Pandora's box belongs here, on whose upper rim Hope alone stuck)

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