It was, however, while debating the character of a non-Greek woman that I decided to write this book. I was on Radio 3, discussing the role of Dido, the Phoenician queen who founded the city of Carthage. To me, Dido was a tragic heroine, self-denying, courageous, heartbroken. To my interviewer, she was a vicious schemer. I was responding to her in Virgil’s Aeneid, he was responding to her in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. I’d spent so long thinking about ancient sources I’d forgotten that most people get their classics from much more modern sources （Marlowe is modern to classicists）。 Dismal though I think the film Troy to be, for example, it has probably been seen by more people than have read the Iliad.
So I decided I would choose ten women whose stories have been told and retold – in paintings, plays, films, operas, musicals and more – and I would show how differently they were viewed in the ancient world. How major female characters in Ovid would become non-existent Hollywood wives in twenty-first-century cinema. How artists would recreate Helen to reflect the ideals of beauty of their own time, and we would lose track of the clever, funny, sometimes frightening woman that she is in Homer and Euripides. And how some modern writers and artists were finding these women, just like I was, and putting them back at the heart of the story.
Every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards. Myths may be the home of the miraculous, but they are also mirrors of us. Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth. We have made space in our storytelling to rediscover women who have been lost or forgotten. They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people.
Pandora
WHEN WE THINK OF PANDORA, WE PROBABLY HAVE A PICTURE in our minds. She holds a box in her hands, or she’s sitting beside one. She is opening it either because she is curious to see what’s inside, or because she knows what it contains and wants to let it out. Its contents are abstract but terrible: all the evils in the world are now set loose upon us. And, gratifyingly, we know exactly who to blame: the beautiful woman who couldn’t leave well alone.
It’s obviously a story which finds its echoes with Eve. Do what you like in Eden, Adam is told by God. Eat from any of the trees. Except that one, the tree of knowledge, which is nonetheless placed in easy reach, next to this persuasive talking snake. Eve is then created, but God doesn’t tell her what she can and can’t eat. She has presumably heard it from Adam, though, because she knows what to say when the snake （whom God has also created） asks her if she can’t eat from any of the trees in the garden. Yes, Eve replies, we can. Just not that one or we’ll die. The knowledge tree? asks the snake. No, you won’t die. You’ll just be able to tell good from evil, like God. Eve shares the fruit with Adam, who was with her, as the book of Genesis tells us. And the snake is right: they don’t die, though Eve is promised agonizing childbirth as her reward for heeding the snake for whose existence and voice God was entirely responsible.
But Pandora has been particularly ill-served by history, even relative to Eve. Eve did at least listen to the snake and eat the thing she’d been told was dangerous. Pandora did not open a box, either from curiosity or malevolence. Indeed the box doesn’t appear in her story until Hesiod’s Works and Days was translated into Latin by Erasmus, in the sixteenth century, well over two millennia after Hesiod was writing in Greek. Erasmus was looking for a word to convey the Greek pithos, meaning ‘jar’。 As the classical scholar and translator M. L. West describes,1 Hesiod meant a ceramic storage jar, a metre or so tall. Greek jars are narrow at the base, broadening out to a wide lip. They are not especially stable: look in any museum of classical antiquities and you will see the many cracks and repairs which reveal their intrinsic fragility. Ceramic pots are often beautiful, ornately decorated works of art. But they are not where one would necessarily choose to store a set of evils that will cause mankind untold griefs for millennia to come. Quite aside from anything else – as anyone who has ever swept a kitchen floor will cheerlessly testify – lids aren’t always tightly fastened. And we have the advantage of screw-tops, something Pandora assuredly did not.
West conjectures that Erasmus confused the stories of Pandora and Psyche （another character from Greek myth who does carry a box – puxos, more usually transliterated as pyxis – when she is sent to the Underworld on a quest）。 It’s certainly a plausible theory. So did Erasmus confuse the two women – Pandora and Psyche – or confuse the two similar-sounding words: jar – pithos, and box – puxos （in Greek; pyxis in Latin）？ Either way, the loser is Pandora. Because, while it might take effort to open a box, it’s much easier to knock a lid off or smash a top-heavy ceramic jar. And yet the linguistically doctored image of Pandora opening a box with malice aforethought is the one which has entered our culture.