Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [106]
Destined to suffer this torture for eternity, Prometheus was only freed when he used his gift of forethought to assure Zeus he had nothing to fear from a seemingly threatening prophecy. Zeus let Prometheus go. But he had one more “trick up his toga” to spring on mankind. The Lord of Olympus instructed Hephaestus to sculpt a lovely girl from earth and water. When the craft god was finished, all the gods then contributed other gifts to the first woman. As in a scene from a fairy-tale “finishing school,” Athena gave this creation beautiful clothes and taught her to weave on the loom. Aphrodite endowed her with beauty and charm, but the heartbreak and the sorrow of love as well. Finally Hermes—at Zeus’s urging—instilled in her the ability to lie persuasively. (Hermes was instructed to give to the woman “thievish morals and to add the soul of a bitch”—in Hesiod’s less than loving words.) So, Hermes “filled her with lies, with swindles, all sorts of thievish behavior,” and she was named Pandora, which in Greek means “all gifts.”
Though Prometheus warned his brother Epimetheus—a not-so-sharp tool whose name means “afterthought”—not to accept this gift from Zeus, Epimetheus was enchanted and married Pandora, who arrived bearing a package.
What was in Pandora’s “box”?
First of all, it wasn’t a “box,” but a covered jar. But that’s another story, and we’ll come to it in a bit.
The Greek equivalent of the biblical Eve, Pandora was the first woman, and according to the myth, created by Zeus as a punishment for men. Just as Zeus had been tricked by Prometheus with skin and bones that had been concealed under some enticingly glistening fat—an offering that looked good on the outside—Zeus returned the favor by sending Pandora, a “package” that seemed well wrapped but concealed trouble. Zeus also sent along a somewhat mysterious jar.
When Hermes delivered Pandora to Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus, he was smitten by her, even though she was a “curse to men who must live by bread,” in Hesiod’s woman-hating words. In spite of Prometheus’s warnings against accepting anything from Zeus, Epimetheus welcomed Pandora. Hesiod never says that Pandora was told not to open the jar. But plagued by insatiable curiosity, Pandora opened the jar given to Epimetheus by Zeus. Out flew all the ills that torment mankind—hard work, pain, and dreadful diseases that bring death. They all escaped from the jar to plague humanity.
The curious twist to Hesiod’s story is that only hope did not escape from the jar. Pandora put the lid back on the jar before hope could escape. But there is some ambiguity in that. Does it mean man has hope because it has not flown away? Or is it trapped within the jar? Hesiod does not explain. What is clear is that he takes a dim view of women, much like the authors of the biblical folktale in Genesis who blame the suffering of the world on Eve. Of Pandora, Hesiod says in Theogony, “From her descends the ruinous race and tribe of women.”
Commenting on Pandora and the Greek view of women, classicist Barry Powell wrote in Classical Mythology, “Among the Greeks, misogyny seems to be based not so much on primitive magical terror, or economic resentment as…on a male resentment of the institution of monogamy itself. Greek myth is obsessed with hostile relations between the sexes, especially between married couples…. We need to remember that…ancient literature, and myth, was composed by men