The Jar That Held All the World's Troubles

The story begins with theft. Prometheus stole fire from heaven and gave it to mankind, and Zeus, king of the gods, could not let such defiance go unanswered. His revenge would not fall on Prometheus alone but on all of humanity, and it would arrive wrapped in beauty.

Zeus had Pandora fashioned and sent to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus. With her came a container — in Hesiod's original Greek telling, not a box at all but a large storage jar, a pithos, the kind ordinarily used to hold wine, oil, or grain. Curiosity, Hesiod wrote, led Pandora to open it, and in doing so she released sickness, death, and countless unnamed evils into the world.

She tried to close the jar again, but too late. Only one thing remained trapped inside — the thing usually translated as Hope, though scholars note the Greek word elpis could just as easily mean something closer to 'expectation,' with no promise of comfort attached.

How that jar became a 'box' in popular memory is its own small mystery of translation. The mistake is usually traced to the sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus, who, retelling the myth in Latin within his collection of proverbs, the Adagia of 1508, swapped the Greek pithos for the Latin pyxis — a box. In his version it is Epimetheus, not Pandora, who opens it, illustrating the old saying that a fool is made wise only by experiencing trouble firsthand.

The idea of a divine jar dispensing fortune to humanity did not begin with Pandora, either. Homer's Iliad already describes two urns standing in the palace of Zeus, one filled with evil gifts and one with good, mixed out to mortals in varying measure. Later, the poet Theognis of Megara suggested a version in which the jar held blessings rather than curses, and a fable recorded by Babrius has a nameless foolish man — not Pandora — release the good things by opening a jar the gods had sent, leaving only hope behind to promise their eventual return.