"There is no such thing as an authoritative, final version of a myth."
Dale Woodiel
Harvard
University
Almost a century ago, in
volume 20 of The Journal of Hellenic Studies, published in London in 1900, a Cambridge University
classicist, a Miss Jane E. Harrison, introduced an article entitled
"Pandora's Box" with the following statement:
No
myth is more familiar than that of Pandora, [and] none perhaps has been so
completely misunderstood. Pandora is the first woman, the beautiful mischief:
she opens the forbidden box, out comes every evil that flesh is heir to; hope only remains . . . The box of Pandora is
proverbial, and that is the more remarkable as she never had a box at all. [1]
This comment addresses not only what Harrison sees as an example of
mistaken iconography in the Pandora myth, but also, in its substance, it
addresses directly the dynamics [2]
of the myth's evolution: its origins, its variations of content and format, and
its significance at any point along its evolutionary journey.
Harrison's
point, of course, is that the container mentioned in the earliest written
account of the Pandora story, that in Hesiod's Works and Days, is a pithos (W&D 94) - a very large
storage jar, not a small box (pyxis)
as it would later become. Such pithoi, generally more than
four feet high and two feet wide, were
placed partially buried in cellars and used by the ancient Greeks for storing
oil or wine or grain. [i] Every other classical and medieval writer who
told the story of Pandora mentions a pithos, with a mega poma,
a large lid, just as Hesiod had (W&D
94). The earliest reference to Pandora's Box yet identified is in Erasmus' Adagiorum Chiliades Tres published in 1508.[ii]
Today,
the icon of the box of Pandora has become so fixed that to anyone other than a
group of classicists a reference to Pandora's "jar" sounds strange.
Even the magnificent exhibit that opened last fall at the Walters Gallery in
Baltimore devoted to women in classical Greece was billed as "Pandora's
Box. [iii]
Harrison, however, was unable in 1900 to accept such mislabeling as
inevitable. Such a mistake was for her a vital error of the sort that would
"breed the corruption of a total mythological misconception."[iv]
Convinced by depictions on a variety of fifth-century vases [v]
that the Pandora story was an etiological myth originally associated with the
Athenian festival of the Pithoigia, Harrison understandably saw such a critical
alteration of iconography as severing forever Pandora's distinction as an
Earth Goddess.[vi]
If one
sets aside the specifics of Harrison's argument, her charge related to
"the corruption of a total mythological misconception" introduces an
important question regarding the dynamics of myths. Is it possible to have a
"misconception" of a myth? Does not such a phrase have almost
oxymoronic overtones? Is not the assumption of versions a part of the definition of a myth?
Assuming Erasmus altered Hesiod's version of this old story, as he obvious did,
so what? To be bound to the generally-perceived "original" version
found in Hesiod is to ignore the dynamics at work in the evolution of such a
myth - the cultural, social, and even political forces that have influenced its
transformations over the centuries.
In fact, the alterations in a
very old Pandora story (or stories) which Hesiod himself made in his Works
and Days go far beyond a
single substitution of iconography such as a large jar for a small chest. Not
only does he drastically revise one or more older stories, including perhaps
the one to which Harrison holds allegiance, but he delivers it (or them) to us
in fragments.[vii] Such variations and revisions are inevitable
in the life of a myth with the inherent richness of the Pandora story.
It is important to remember
that the story of Prometheus or Persephone or Oedipus that one finds in the
anthologies of Joseph Campbell or Michael Grant or Robert Graves did not
originate with Homer and Hesiod. In fact, it could be said that Hesiod and
Euripides and Robert Graves engaged in similar activities, only at different
moments in history. The work of Albert Lord and other scholars of the oral
tradition has shown that what might be called "creative
embellishment" has always been an essential characteristic of the art of
the "singers of tales."[viii]
Richmond Hathorn, in the preface to his Greek Mythology, warns his readers they will be
disappointed with his volume if they expect to find in it the original or the
authoritative ancient form of a myth. "There is," says Hathorn,
"no such thing as an authoritative, final version of a myth. And in the
case of the original form, we either do not have it or do not know it if we do.
"[ix]
We have
traditionally looked to Hesiod for the
Pandora story because it is in his poems that it first appears in Greek,
fragmented and confused as it is therein. In the Theogony, generally believed to be the
earlier of the two poems, an account is given of the creation of the first
woman, a "beautiful evil" (585), but the name Pandora is not
mentioned and there is no mention of a jar.
According
to this account, Zeus had ordered Prometheus chained to a rock at the mercy of
a liver-devouring eagle for no reason other than he found Prometheus clever
and unruly and "full of various wiles" (Th. 511). After Prometheus had been released by Heracles
and Zeus' wrath somewhat abated, Prometheus deceived Zeus in the division of
the sacrifice. In retaliation for this elaborate deception Zeus then withheld
fire from mortals, only to have it cleverly stolen by Prometheus and carried
away in a hollow fennel stalk. "Forthwith," says Hesiod, "he
[Zeus] made an evil thing for men as the price of fire" (570).
Zeus'
creation, in the form a beautiful, shy maiden, elaborately adorned by Athena
and lovely in every outward respect,
would inwardly be a
"beautiful evil" (kalon
kakon) filled with "sheer guile, not to be with-stood by men" (Th. 589). From this creation
would spring "the race of women and female kind" (590), whose nature
would be to do mischief and who would tend to live like drones off the toil of
others. Furthermore, if the dreadful burdens brought by the creation of woman
was the first evil, the second was that the man who "avoids marriage and
the sorrows that women cause, and will not wed, reaches deadly old age without
anyone to tend his years" (603-6).
The
version of Pandora's story in the Works and Days, although much more elaborate, is similarly introduced, but in
this case not only are Athena's gifts of skills in needlework and weaving
bestowed on the creature, but also Hermes' gifts of a shameless mind and
deceitful nature, and Aphrodite's gifts of "cruel longing and cares that
weary the limbs" (W&D
60-69). The creation is named Pandora, meaning the ''all-endowed,"
or perhaps "she to whom all gifts are given," and at Zeus' direction
she is presented as a gift to Epimetheus, the slow-witted
"after-thinking" brother of the clever Prometheus. Unlike the version
in the Theogony, however,
this is not the end of the story; this is not to be just a tale of a bad joke
played by an all powerful god on a mentally-challenged Titan. Instead, at this
point in his story Hesiod abruptly introduces a dramatic action which leaves us
with a number of puzzling questions.
After a description of a
prior Eden-like existence in which hard work was not required of men to survive
and in which the general evils of this world did not exist (W&D 90 ff.), we are told
that this newly created woman removed
the lid from a large jar, releasing countless plagues and diseases and
other evils into the world. Furthermore, by the will of Zeus, we are told, only
Hope (Elpis) remained within "in an unbreakable home
under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door [because) the
lid of the jar stopped her" (94-99). The tale ends, as it does in the Theogony, with the reminder, lest we forget,
that "there is no way to escape the will of Zeus" (105).
This account is most
intriguing for what it fails to reveal: What is this large jar? Was it a part
of the gift? Why and by whose direction were the evils placed inside, and why
were they released? Is this action intended as yet another illustration of the
dangers of human curiosity, like that of the biblical Eve to which it has been
inevitably compared?[x]
Was Pandora told specifically not to open the jar? And in exactly what respect
is hope (Elpis) to be viewed as an evil? A commonsense
reading of the text suggests the answers to such questions were in other
stories which would have been instinctively familiar to Hesiod's audience. We,
whose knowledge is confined to Hesiod's version and its derivatives, can only
speculate.
Some scholars believe that a
second-century CE account of the myth by the fabulist Babrius more clearly
reflects the older Pandora story than "the one forced upon posterity by
Hesiod.[xi]
In his fifty-eighth fable, Babrius offers a drastic contrast to Hesiod's
version by placing man (anthropos)
in the role of Pandora and including in the vessel only Goods rather
than Evils:
Zeus
assembled all the goods in the vessel and gave it sealed to man; but man,
unable to restrain his eagerness to know, said, 'What in the world can be
inside?' And, lifting the lid, he set them free to return to the houses of the
gods and to fly thither, thus fleeing heavenwards from the earth. Hope alone
remained.
[xii]
This
version of the story is obviously clearer and more logical than Hesiod's
version. Furthermore, its implications about the dangers of impatience and reckless
curiosity are appropriate to Hesiod's stated purpose, the instruction of his
wayward brother, and, most significant, it places Elpis in an understandable context.
Although, due to a human action, the Goods have been forfeited, Hope remains.
It is interesting to note that slightly earlier mythologists such as
Apollodorus and Hyginus [xiii]
confine their accounts of the story to the creation of the first woman,
eliminating completely the jar and Pandora's evil aspect. [xiv]
It has been acknowledged from
the beginnings of modern scholarship, certainly from the era of Jane Harrison
and Sir James Frazer onward, that fifth-century pottery and other
archeological evidence depict Pandora as an Earth-goddess, indeed the Mother of
Life, whose reputation might logically have flourished with the beginnings of
agriculture - an age, as Michael Grant puts it, when "woman, with her
unaccountable
phenomena personifying life,
was mysterious and awe-inspiring [and] fertility was the community's most
highly prized value.” [xv]Pandora
should, therefore, be perceived as "the all-giver," rather than
"the one to whom all is given."
The
validity of this way of conceiving Pandora's role has been greatly enhanced in
this century by research which displays convincing parallels between the
Pandora story and Babylonian creation stories. Myths such as the Enuma Elish and Enki and the Pickaxe depict, among other creations, the
fashioning of mankind from water and dirt, and a tradition in which man is
said to have shot up like a plant from the ground through a hole made by the
god Enlil.[xvi]Such
works substantiate the long held assumption that the Pandora story had been
associated with the myth of creation in the ancient Near East long before the
time of Hesiod.
As fascinating
as such studies might be, however, attempting to solve the Pandora puzzle, or
to fix any myth absolutely, is inevitably disappointing and frustrating until
one faces the fact that it cannot be done, though it must be acknowledged that
some mythologists such as the late Jean-Pierre Vernant have been impressive in
their attempts. But while Vernant sees the combined versions of the myth in
Hesiod as defining the new and permanent quality of human life, even he is
compelled to conclude that the combination of elements "embedded at the
core of the myth" comprise "a web of interrelations so dense as to be
inextricable.”[xvii]
Indeed, it is this denseness, this amazing web of parallels and opposites and
counterbalances that has obviously sustained the myth over the millennia.
It is
instructive in any attempt to analyze the Pandora story to recognize that the
format of the Works and Days, apart
from its specific treatment of the Pandora myth, is closely modeled on the
"wisdom" or instructional texts of the ancient Near East which traditionally
included a long list of admonishments and "shall nots" compiled by a
father or a king in hopes that his son or his heir would grow up to be a
hard-working responsible adult.[xviii]
The recipient of the admonitions in this case is Hesiod's lazy and deceitful
brother Perses. Hesiod obviously used the Pandora myth in the Works and Days to support the over-riding theme of
the poem: Life is hard; evils in many forms pervade our lives; and hard work is
required to survive-truths not unlike those parents attempt to impress upon
their children even today as they emerge from their age of innocence.
In his Theogony Hesiod had used the myth of Pandora
to explain the creation of women and the reason for their duplicitous nature.
In the Works and Days it
serves to explain why man must struggle unrelentingly to survive in a world
plagued by labor and disease. But, why, one is compelled to ask, the ambiguous
and absurd portrayal of woman as the cause? "A person who ascribes all
evil to one segment of the human species is not a rational thinker,"
charges one critic, "but [rather] a person possessed by an emotion so
violent that it exceeds an objective correlative.[xix]
Because
logical analysis of such a story is out of the question, an answer, if there is
to be one, must be found in the symbolic
sense to be gleaned from the story: from the pithos itself, from which the evils now in
the world originally emerged, and from Elpis which remains inside. Over-riding both the pithos and Elpis - or one might better say embodied
in both - is the symbol of woman herself.
A number
of interesting hypotheses have been set forth providing possible reasons for
Hesiod's radical redefinition of woman. It has been suggested that Hesiod's
transformation of Pandora the Earth goddess to that of the beautiful curious
woman bent on mischief is an act of "theological animus," an almost
necessary gesture amidst a transition from matriarchal to patriarchal theology
in the ancient world.[xx]
A number of socio-economic reasons have also been suggested related to changes
in agricultural methods and shifts in population growth in the centuries before
Hesiod.[xxi]
Yet, regardless of the cause, the ultimate result (in league, of course, with
the Garden of Eden myth of the ancient Hebrews) was the encoding of misogyny as
a characteristic of western culture, the effects of which remain relevant even
to the present day.
Although
obviously fascinated by the Pandora story, Hesiod's view of woman is ambiguous
at every turn, and his complex and apprehensive view of feminine nature is
difficult to explain. One critic sees it serving "as a focus for his anxiety
about life in general.[xxii]
Another more Freudian critic has equated Hesiod's attitude with that of a
troubled young idealist who, discovering that reality perverts his every ideal,
dream an explanation-not unrelated, of course, to the woman who has abandoned
him after bringing him into the world.[xxiii]
Although Hesiod makes much in
the Theogony of woman's
liability as a drone on man's economy, he also grudgingly admits that a woman
is a necessity for a man to have around in his old age, a statement which seems
to acknowledge the convention that a wife would inevitably be much younger than
her husband, as well as the fact that she would also be required to produce a
child or children who would assist in their father's care as well. Therefore,
one must again ask, how can the vital source of children be connected with
evil?
Perhaps a partial answer can
be found in the unknown potential which a child symbolizes and the hope with
which each child is associated by its parents from the moment of its birth.
Here the way one defines Elpis is critical. Elpis
is generally defined as a neutral "expectation," neither
necessarily good or bad, perhaps a combination of "hope" in a
conventional sense combined with fear. Froma Zeitlin, however, suggests that Elpis
functions as yet another ambiguous human uncertainty about the future that is "good if it inspires men to work and
assure their livelihood, to fill their [pithoi]
with grain, bad if it lulls an idle man into illusory expectations for
the future. But," she continues, "taken as an image that embodies an idea, the Elpis that is left in the jar most closely corresponds to the child
(or the hope of the child) residing in its mother's womb."[xxiv]
Zeitlin goes on to review the
historical correlation of the womb with a container or jar in both ancient
medical and philosophical texts, citing Hippocrates and later anatomists as
likening a woman's uterus to an upside-down jar. Continuing the analogy by
equating Pandora's removal of the jar's seal or lid as the breaching of her
virginity, Zeitlin sees the closing of the jar upon Elpis, which remains inside, as the beginning
of pregnancy. [xxv]
Hope remains within "in the form of the expectations for the child to be.[xxvi]
As interesting as Zeitlin's analysis is, however, it appears, even to her,
incomplete and unsatisfying. The ambiguous quality of Elpis leaves us in a muddle.
If Elpis has been placed in the jar, is it to
be considered an evil? If so, why does it not come out with the other evils?
Better: why does Zeus leave it inside? Is it, asks one critic, "the one
good that Zeus allows humans to mitigate the curse of Pandora? If it is the
mitigating factor, why is hope confined to the urn? Is this to say that not even
hope is allowed us, that the human condition is hopeless? Or is Pandora
offering us hope as the last and greatest of all evils? Is Pandora holding out
hope, or withholding hope?"[xxvii]
For every critical point of view on a given aspect of the story - every icon,
every symbolic action, every lesson to be derived-one can easily find an
opposite point of view.
In the context of Norman
Austin's assertion that Hesiod's interpretations of the Pandora story
"have the mysteriously logical quality of the completely irrational,[xxviii]
I am persuaded by the arguments that suggest the two versions are simply
variants of the same archetypal myth, both etiological, which combine into an
explanation for the cause of evil - i.e. the necessity for human labor - in the
world. As in the myth of Eve in the Garden of Eden, Hesiod's male mind finds in
the duplicity of women both evil's symptom and its cause. [xxix]
And the pessimism which Jane Harrison identified a hundred years ago is for
unexplainable reasons the dominating tone in his narrative.[xxx]
The Pandora puzzle, unlike
the jig-saw types familiar to us, does not really contain all the pieces
required for satisfactory completion, a fact which in the opinion of the critic
M. L. West should come as no surprise to us. We are, he says, after all,
"in a myth, not a grocer's shop." This myth, he continues, is
"about the origins of hardship and of hope-amid-hardship.
Such questions do not have
easy answers.
So, while one might not come
away from the Pandora myth, every piece having fallen into its proper place,
many of the major pieces of its puzzle can be identified, and some of the key
sections of the total picture are revealed. Ultimately, aided by West's
friendly admonition, one retains a dream-like mosaic of perceptions and insights
about the human condition from which can be derived myriad interpretations - precisely
what one expects from the best of the ancient myths.
[The research for this essay was completed during the 1995-96 academic year in residence as a Visiting NEH Teacher Scholar at Harvard University. It was presented at the 1996 spring conference of the Classical Association of New England and later published in the New England Classical Journal.]
[The research for this essay was completed during the 1995-96 academic year in residence as a Visiting NEH Teacher Scholar at Harvard University. It was presented at the 1996 spring conference of the Classical Association of New England and later published in the New England Classical Journal.]
END
NOTES:
[ii] I use the word dynamics here to describe the forces at work in any complex matter, not to suggest the evolution of myths is governed by the fixed or natural laws of physics, although there clearly are interesting similarities.
[iii] It was in a large pithos (dolium in Latin) that the Cynic Oiogenes was said to have been residing when he had his famous encounter with Alexander. Pithoi were also used as coffins and by the Romans as public urinals.
[iv]D and E. Panofsky, Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (New York 1956) 15-16. Harrison ([above, note 1) 100) had attributed the error in translation to Giraldus Lillius' Historiarum Deorum Syntagma published in 1580.
[viii] Harrison (above, note 1) 101; J. E. Harrison, Prolegomenal 10 the Study of Greek Religion (Princeton 1991) 276 ff.
[xii] For early references see Panofsky (above, note 4) 11 ff. For a more contemporary assessment of the Eve-Pandora parallels see Norman Austin's Meaning and Being in Myth (University Park and London 1990).
[xiv] Quoted in Panofsky (above, note 4) 8, from Babrii Fabulae
Aesopeae, ed. O. Crusius (Leipzig 1897) no. 58.
[xvi] In his account Apollodorus allows that Pandora and Epimetheus' daughter Pyrrha married Prometheus' son Deucalion. After surviving the flood (which Zeus sends to end the Bronze Age) by floating in a chest, the couple re-populate the earth by tossing stones over their heads. Hers become women; his become men (1.7.2).
[xviii] For detailed analyses of such parallels and Hesiod's origins
in the Near East see P. Walcot's Hesiod and the Near East (Cardilf 1966) 55-79 and C. Penglase's Greek Myths and Mesopotamia (London 1994) 197-229.
[xix] J.P. Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, tr. 1. Lloyd (New York 1980) 197.
[xx] For thorough treatment of "wisdom" elements in Works and Days see the "Prolegomena" and the "Commentary" in M. L. West's Hesiod: Works and Days (Oxford 1978).
[xxiii] See L. S. Sussman's "Workers and Drones: Labor, Idleness and Gender Definition in Hesiod's Beehive" in Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers ed. by 1. Peradotto and J.P. Sullivan (Albany 1984) 79-93.
[xxviii] It is interesting to note that even today pregnant women are said, in the vernacular, to be "expecting."
[xxx] Austin (above, note 12) 75.
[xxxi] Austin (above, note 8) 284
[xxxii] Harrison, Prolegomena (above, note 8.
[xxxi] Austin (above, note 8) 284
[xxxii] Harrison, Prolegomena (above, note 8.
[xxxiii] West (above, note 28) 169.
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