Objects & creatures
Pandora's Jar
pan-DOR-uhz JAR
Also known as Pandora's box
The container that held every evil — and it was a jar, not a box, until a translator slipped.
Pandora is Zeus's answer to Prometheus. Fire had been stolen for mortals, so Zeus had Hephaestus make the first woman out of earth and water, and had each god give her a gift: beauty from Aphrodite, skill from Athena, and from Hermes a deceitful nature and a taste for lies. Her name means 'all-gifted'.
She was sent to Prometheus's brother Epimetheus — 'afterthought', which is the joke — who had been warned to accept nothing from Zeus and accepted her anyway. She came with a large storage jar, a pithos, and she opened it.
Everything harmful escaped: sickness, toil, grief, the whole catalogue, scattering silently because Zeus had taken their voices so they could not be heard coming. Pandora replaced the lid in time to trap one thing inside — Elpis, hope.
Hesiod never explains what that means, and readers have argued about it ever since. If hope is a blessing, why was it in the jar of evils? If it stayed inside, do we have it or not? The 'box' is not even his: Erasmus translated pithos as pyxis, a box, in the sixteenth century, and the mistranslation has outlived the original.
Hesiod tells the story twice, and the second telling is harsher: Pandora exists specifically as a punishment, and the poet uses her to explain why life is work. Later Greek writers were less comfortable with that, and by the Roman period the jar had become the interesting part and Pandora herself merely curious — which is roughly how the story is still told.
Gods involved
Pandora's Jar: common questions
Was it Pandora's box or Pandora's jar?
A jar — a pithos, a large storage vessel. Erasmus mistranslated it as pyxis, a box, in the 1500s, and the error became the standard English phrase.
Why was hope left in the jar?
Hesiod does not say, and it is one of the most argued-over lines in Greek literature. Whether hope was withheld from humanity or preserved for it depends entirely on how you read a jar of evils containing it.
Which god is your parent?
Twelve questions and the campfire decides.