And that, surely, is the real secret hidden inside Pandora’s jar. It’s also an excellent description of Pandora herself. Earlier in this chapter, I quoted the oxymoronic description of her in Hesiod’s Theogony: kalon kakon23 – ‘a beautiful evil’ – which Zeus gives to mortals as a penalty for the fire that Prometheus had stolen for us. The phrase is usually translated that way round （a ‘pretty bane’ is how she is described in the Oxford World’s Classics edition）。 But both words are adjectives, and both can have a moral or physical meaning: kalos can be fine, beautiful, pretty, and also morally good, noble or virtuous. Kakos, equally, can be bad or evil, and also inept, ugly, unfortunate. We could translate the phrase the other way around: rather than being a beautiful evil, Pandora could be an ugly good. We never do translate it like this, though, because there is so much other evidence piled up in favour of the traditional version: all the gods provide Pandora with lovely qualities, so she must be beautiful. And anyway, Zeus demands her creation as ant’ agathoio – in return for the good thing （fire）。 The word agathos really is unambiguous: it always means something desirable or good. But the word anti is a bit more fluid. It can mean opposite, before, in return for, for the sake of. Translators have always assumed that Pandora is beautiful but evil because Zeus demands payback for the fire mortals have illicitly gained. But kakon doesn’t have to have a moral dimension at all: we could translate it with equal accuracy to mean a loss, a misfortune, an injury. Something bad for us, but not something ill-intentioned in its own right. Zeus may wish us ill, in other words, but that doesn’t mean Pandora herself is evil, any more than the lightning which Zeus hurls at those of us who displease him is evil. Lightning is neutral, neither good nor bad, however much we fear it. Perhaps we can accept that Pandora is the same, unless we choose to see her otherwise.
Jocasta
IN THE FOURTH CENTURY BCE, THE COMIC POET ANTIPHANES MADE a pointed remark about the relative difficulty of writing comedy over tragedy.1 Comedians, he has a character explain, have to invent their plots. Whereas a tragedian just has to mention Oedipus and the audience knows everything else: that his father was Laius, his mother was Jocasta, who his daughters were, what he would do, what he had done.
Was Antiphanes correct, and is he still? Does everyone today know who Oedipus was? And what more do we know about him, beyond the barest branches of his （admittedly complex） family tree? Equally relevant, what do we know about his mother, Jocasta, who shares his downfall? And how does her character shift in the different versions of the stories told about the royal house of Thebes, one of the best-known of all Greek myths? Its modern notoriety is at least in part thanks to Freud, who, in his famed Oedipus complex, posited that all boys go through a phase of wanting to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers.
Only seven Sophocles plays have survived to the present day, the most famous of which was and remains Oedipus the King. Its title in Greek is Oedipus Tyrannos, and, for reasons which defy common sense, it is routinely referred to today as Oedipus Rex, in spite of the fact that no one involved in it is Roman （the word rex is the Latin for ‘king’） and it makes any normal person think of dinosaurs, which do not feature. About a century after it was first produced, Aristotle would discuss it favourably in his Poetics, implying that it was still regularly performed and would be well known to his audience. He thought it the perfect tragedy.
Astonishingly, given its enduring popularity, Oedipus Tyrannos only came second in the competition when it was first staged （perhaps in 429 BCE）。 Sophocles was beaten by Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus. Ancient and modern scholars have used this fact to prove the terrible stupidity of judges when it comes to making the right choice in creative contests. A generous person might wonder whether perhaps Philocles was not too bad a playwright, if he could produce something which beat Oedipus. But certainly his contemporaries were having none of it: the comedian, Aristophanes, referred to Philocles’ work leaving a bad taste in the mouth.2
The story of Oedipus has an archetypal, almost elemental quality. But what actually happens in that story is very much less certain than we might think. Let’s start with Sophocles, since his is the version most likely to be known today, and look at the plot in some detail. The story of Oedipus covers perhaps twenty years and multiple distinct locations （Corinth, Delphi, a crossroads outside Delphi, Mount Cithaeron and Thebes）。 But the action takes place in a single day and at a single location, outside the gates of the royal house of Thebes （a city-state in Boeotia, in central Greece）。 Cramming so much backstory into one place and time is – quite aside from the beauty of the verse and the mesmerizing momentum of the plot – an absolutely breathtaking achievement. Particularly when you consider that Oedipus Tyrannos is only 1,530 lines long: you could easily see it twice in the time it takes to watch Hamlet or King Lear.