What Pandora let out and what she left in

{This is a paper read at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Oct. 6, 2006. Changes made for the website version up to 5/31/08 are enclosed in curly brackets.}

Hesiod’s Works and Days says that the gods created the first woman Pandora as punishment for Prometheus’s trickery and delivered her to men in the person of his brother Epimetheus. My subject today is what the poem says happened next to climax the story; namely, she opened a certain vessel. What I will do is summarize the opinions of the commentators on what this action constituted. I’ll avoid their actual arguments, but {the references note} the people I’ll specifically mention, mostly writing in the past ten years, plus two bibliographical references to the remainder.

Neither will I go over the text {which is given with an English translation on the text page}, with some footnotes for the benefit of those interested in that sort of detail. In summary, the account says that humanity had been free of evils, but Pandora opened some jar in such a way that whatever were its contents did not remain, and thereby caused woes. Only Elpis, meaning either Expectation or Hope, did not emerge. Evils now afflict humanity, particularly diseases. Now whatever you may have heard, the text does not specify just what escaped the jar. That must be inferred, and of course the standard inference is that, to speak in popular terms, “Pandora opened a box of evils to let them into the world, but left man Hope.” That is, the evils cited in lines 91-92, or ‑93 if that verse is authentic, were actually imprisoned in the vessel until Pandora let them out to plague us as in 100-104. True, Hesiod speaks of a pithos, which was a large jar, not a box. Dora and Erwin Panofsky, and now Immanuel Musäus, have noted that we hear of a box today because the influential 16^th century figure Erasmus specified that type of container for certain reasons.  {Added 5/9/08:  The avante garde scholar Vered Lev Kenaan now suggests that this mistake nonetheless reveals “the inner connection ... between woman and the idea of a text.”}  But either way, it is construed as having contained evils by most commentators, beginning at least as early as the philosopher Philodemus of Gadara in the 1^st century B.C.E.  The view that it preserves Elpis, whatever else it held before it was opened, goes back further, at least to the Homer commentator Comanus of Naucratis in the 2^nd century.  The view is probably still earlier since already in the 5^th, only two centuries or so after our text coalesced, pseudo-Aeschylus had Prometheus if not Pandora say that he gave men “blind hopes.”  Today the view that evils were released and that Hope is preserved is found in West’s text commentary, and since 1996 in works by Graziano Arrighetti, Stephanie Nelson, Manuel Sánchez Ortiz de Landeluce, Rosanna Lauriola, and most recently Jenny Strauss Clay {added 9/19/07: but even more recently Liz Warman and (9/20/07) Domenico Fasciano}, although they differ on whether the hope is good, evil, or ambiguous.  The idea is hoary enough for many to take it as background for further interpretation, for example, as Musäus notes with references, to propose that the pithos stands for the womb.  {Added 4/17/08:  Even more deeply, Lev Kenaan considers the pithos emblematic of Pandora herself, in that she “embod[ies] … the interplay between exteriority and interiority.”}  So the standard inference has yielded relatively subtle thinking as well as the popular warning against “opening a Pandora’s box.”

Yet there is dissent. It has arisen mostly out of wonder about what Hope was doing in a jar of evils. (The Hesiod authority Solmsen, among others, even gave up on understanding the text.) A sizeable body of critics feels that if the jar was a prison for evils it must still be a prison for Elpis, so that she is kept away from humanity, not preserved for it. This is the view of Verdenius’s commentary, and since 1996 has been argued by Shannon Byrne, Wilhelm Blümer, and most recently the art historian Jenifer Neils, if again differing as to the character of Elpis, as well as whether she is Hope or Expectation. The position may or may not be ancient, depending on how one reads a cryptic statement by the Homer critic Aristarchus that I can go into later if anyone wishes.
{Addendum 10/23/06: No one at the meeting asked for that amplification, but briefly the issue is as follows.  Aristarchus is said to have interpreted the narrative so that the elpis “of good escaped, while that of evil remained” in the jar.  Verdenius interprets the second phrase as support for his view that Elpis is evil and kept away from humanity.  The problem is that the scholiast who relays the opinion casts it as a response to the opinion of Comanus cited in the previous paragraph, i.e., as if Aristarchus too thought the jar preserved Elpis, pace Verdenius.  But in turn, the problem with that reading is that it assumes that humanity is characterized by expectation of evil, whereas that idea is very un-Hesiodic (as the articles of both Sánchez Ortiz and Lauriola document).  So either Aristarchus misinterpreted Hesiod or something is wrong with the report of his view by the scholiast.}

{Added 9/29/07: However, Chad Schroeder interprets the Comanus and Aristarchus statements (his fragments 65 and 66, respectively, which are quoted, translated, and annotated at the end of his dissertation) differently. He says that Comanus is disagreeing with Hesiod that Elpis could be left in the jar, because it is among humans, implying that Comanus thought the jar had previously kept it away from humans, and that Aristarchus is only caviling that it is only the “hope” of good things that is among humans by escaping. Schroeder could well be correct and I not, especially since Aristarchus makes more sense in his reading.}

And some of us handle the Elpis problem a different way, namely by denying that the other contents were evils. Indeed, as Musäus and my review of his book discuss, there is reason to believe that no one construed a jar of evils until Hellenistic times, after the 4^th century B.C.E. Thus in 1989 I argued the contrary. Specifically, I said the jar contained good spirits, resembling genies, which before Pandora’s act were available to combat the evils cited in 91-92 or 93, considered to already be in the world, but not after it. This idea is ancient. Among others, in the 3^rd century C.E. the fable collector Babrius spoke of a pithos of useful entities, which when freed left for Mt. Olympus to be with the gods, leaving only Elpis. Indeed, although the poet Theognis did not cite a jar, already in the 6^th century, B.C.E., he said only Elpis stayed on earth after certain noble deities went to Olympus. Here the point of the retention of Elpis is that only she remains to humans, since every other aid has left us. Expectation is formally good but not really when it is alone. Thus in a goal-oriented activity such as athletics you have the subjective quality called confidence, that is, expectation of success as opposed to hope for it. It is recognized as being of value if accompanied by objective skills, but is useless without them. {Added 1/23/08: Jonathan Zarecki has now substantially agreed with this interpretation.}

Another way of proposing a jar of good things is to say that they were material provisions, not spirits, which Pandora disposed of in some way. This idea has no direct ancient attestation, although Musäus suggests that it is presumed in a fragment of the Hesiod-influenced Hellenistic poet Callimachus. It was first proposed directly by Eduard Schwartz in 1915, and has now been endorsed by Musäus and apparently Jens Holzhausen, and by Jakub Krajczynski and Wolfgang Rösler in an article that just came out in July. These critics do differ in an essential way. To Musäus and some others, Pandora simply spilled the jar’s contents so that men’s livelihood was lost. The subsequent hunger then allows formerly harmless diseases to attack. The retention of elpis means that we hope for new provisions. But in an original, not to say revolutionary contribution, Krajczynski and Rösler propose that Pandora was the original housewife, who simply used the jar’s contents over a period of time to keep Epimetheus’s household functioning, so that the myth explains the origin of a household division of labor that was common with the Greeks. The ills of lines 100-104 naturally come to the man who must labor to replenish the pithos. As for elpis, these authors say that it is a figure for a small amount of grain the wife leaves to be planted as seed. And for them, seeds represent the hope for a good harvest, not a simple expectation that it will happen.

{Addendum 10/24/06: Holzhausen agrees with Musäus that elpis is the hope for new provision, but actually anticipates Krajczynski and Rösler, in that he says that Pandora’s deed was to “distribute” the provisions in the pithos “in the role of housewife as manager of the household.”}

Those are the written interpretations. But our earliest surviving testimony to the overall narrative is not literary, but archaeological. There are a small number of visual representations of Pandora dating from the 5^th century, B.C.E., whether or not the Hesiodic version of her. Most of them deal with her origin, not the pithos, but the slide {website viewers: see the vase painting reference in the references} shows a vase that may include that. It was excavated over 200 years ago and there have since been many interpretations, as is noted by Manfred Oppermann in the LIMC catalogue. Nonetheless, the two figures on the left are now usually read as Pandora rising from the earth and Epimetheus holding a mallet, respectively, because there is a similar painting where those names are actually lettered in. And to some scholars although not all, the right-most figure is the head of Elpis protruding from the pithos. If so, who is the mature male next to her, as opposed to the youth on the left? To my uneducated eye the one on the left looks like a full sized Epimetheus receiving Pandora in his optimistic youth; the one on the right also Epimetheus but in his later years, stunted after the diseases of the myth have emaciated him, contemplating Elpis as all he has left. However, the bona fide art historian Neils believes the details of the iconography support the left hand male as Hephaestus, who formed Pandora from earth; the right hand one as Zeus, who caused Elpis to be trapped; and the pithos as made of metal, which she reads as a prison. If so, the artist would be our earliest witness to a tradition of the jar imprisoning its contents as opposed to storing them.

Now the debate over these construals has been in process for two thousand years, and I have no elpis of resolving it this morning. I only want to point out what one’s position on the issue implies for the rest of Hesiod’s poem. I do this in the context that while many in the 19^th century thought the overall Works and Days was incoherent, and while their tradition has retained some influence, scholars in the last few years of the 20^th and so far in the 21^st have tended to see coherence in the poem, although there is no consensus yet on details. With this in mind I first ask those who hold that our text says Elpis is kept away from humans if they can live with a conflict in the poem between perceptions of so important a concept, not just as to whether it is good or evil, where there has been much debate, but whether or not it exists. Lines 498-500 {cited in the text page} say that a farmer should not rely on elpis, but that many men do. That is to say, it is present among humans, which is incompatible with keeping it away from humans from the start. So if that is your reading you should also agree with the 19^th century that the poem is incoherent.

And if you are in the majority who believe the pithos imprisoned some things, namely evils, but now preserves others, namely Elpis, you must also be willing to believe that Hesiod could be so confused as to give the jar such a dual function. It is true that some have acknow ledged the confusion, but they assign it less to Hesiod himself than to the genre that for whatever reason he employs here. Thus West states that “mythical jars … imprison evil … and conserve good.” But while there are many cases in world folklore where a vessel serves his first purpose, and others where one serves his second, I have found no case where one does both. Or, Sánchez Ortiz assigns the problem to the inherent irrationality of myth in general, but this conflates the irrationality that myth possesses at an abstract level, whereby its logic is not that of science, with irrationality at a concrete level, such as not grasping the simple function of everyday objects. One might say that logical consistency should not be expected of a poem with superstitious elements like the catalog of dark prohibitions near the end of the “Works” portion. For example, lines 753-4 say that a woman’s bathwater is bad for a man. But to illustrate my point, at least Hesiod does not state that the tub holding that bathwater contains some type of pollution that will infect a man, but also holds some other entity that it somehow keeps away from him. Elsewhere in the poem the pithos in particular is simply a storage jar.

So I claim that if you hold the majority view, where Hesiod was inconsistent on what such a vessel was for, be it from lack of care in treating the materials he inherited or otherwise, then whether you admit it or not you are implying that he was muddleheaded.

I see no such inconsistencies between the overall poem and the jar preserving either good spirits or material provisions. So if you support either of these two interpretations you are free to claim that the overall poem is coherent if that is your wont.

And that is what I believe can be said about the narrative at present with some measure of authority. Thank you.

            {Added 5/31/08: The political scientist Robert Bartlett presents what as far as I know is a unique answer to the problem of how Elpis can be among men by being in the jar, while in contrast the evils -- which he simply assumes are the jar’s other contents, apparently unaware that this point is an issue -- are among men by being outside it.  He says that men really do not have this hope but almost do, because it did not quite escape the jar but remained just under its lip, so that “we now have hope regarding hope.”  (I am not entirely sure that he has avoided confusion here between “having hope” in the sense of possessing the subjective emotion and “having hope” in the sense of a realistic expectation that that the object of the hope’s desire will actually be realized.)}