Look at artistic representations of her which pre-date the widespread reading of Erasmus （who died in 1536） and she is shown with a jar, even if the painter is seeking to cast her as a villain and the image reflects that. Jean Cousin painted her as Eva Prima Pandora,2 a blend of Pandora and Eve, around 1550: lying naked, save for a sheet curled between her legs, jar under one hand, human skull under the other. And there are later paintings which also show her with a jar: Henry Howard’s The Opening of Pandora’s Vase3 in 1834, for example. But the most famous image of her is perhaps from some forty years later, by which time Erasmus’ rewrite seems firmly embedded in the collective artistic consciousness.
In 1871, Rossetti completed his portrait of Pandora holding a small golden casket in her hands. The lid of the casket is studded with large jewels, green and purple, which are echoed by the ornate stones in one of the bracelets she wears on her right wrist. The long, slender fingers of her right hand are flexed as she begins to open the box. Her left hand grips the base firmly. The crack opening between the lid and the box itself is just a thin shadow, but already a coil of orange smoke emanates: it is twisting its way behind Pandora’s red-brown curls. We don’t know what is in the box exactly, but whatever it is, it’s sinister. Look at the side of the box more closely, just above Pandora’s left thumb, and a Latin inscription makes things appear less promising still: ‘Nascitur Ignescitur’4 – born in flames. Rossetti made the casket himself, but it has subsequently been lost.
The portrait is well over a metre tall, and its depth of colour is as fiery as the text at its centre: Pandora wears a crimson dress, which drapes over her arms and body from its high round neckline. Her lips are painted in a perfect bow in the same bright red. A tiny shadow under the centre of her mouth creates the impression that her lower lip protrudes towards the viewer. Her huge blue eyes gaze unapologetically at us. The model was Jane Morris, wife of the artist William, with whom Rossetti had been having what we can reasonably conclude was a thrilling affair. Critics asked themselves what William Morris might think of a work showing his wife in such an undeniably erotic light, painted by another man. Fewer people thought to ask how Jane Morris must have felt to see herself illustrating the description of Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony as kalon kakon5 – a beautiful evil. And no one asked what Pandora might have thought of the object she was holding so tightly, so dangerously in her beautiful hands.
*
Perhaps, then, it’s time to look at Pandora’s story from the beginning, and see how it evolves and how she changes from one writer and artist to the next. As is so often the way with excellent things, we need to go back to the Greeks to see how it began. The earliest source we have is Hesiod, who lived in the late eighth century BCE in Boeotia in central Greece. He tells her story twice, the first time relatively briefly in his poem Theogony.
This poem is an origin story which catalogues the genealogy of the gods. First comes Chaos, then Earth, then the Underworld, and perhaps the first character we might recognize: Eros, who softens flesh and overcomes reason. Chaos creates Erebus and Night, Night creates Air and Day, Earth creates Heaven, and so on. Two generations on, we get to Zeus: Heaven （Ouranos） and Earth （Gaia） have multiple children including Kronos and Rhea. Ouranos turns out to be less than ideal parent material, hiding his children away in a cavern and refusing to let them out into the light. To win freedom from their oppression, Kronos eventually castrates his father with a sharp hook given to him by his mother, and throws the disembodied genitals into the sea （which is what creates Aphrodite. This is probably the time to start pondering whether Freud might have something to say about any of this）。 Kronos and Rhea in turn have multiple children: these pre-Olympian gods are known as Titans. Then Kronos also fails a basic fatherhood test, choosing to swallow each of his offspring whole. Rhea gives birth to Zeus in secret so he won’t be eaten, then Zeus forces Kronos to regurgitate his older siblings and takes over the mantle of king of the gods for himself. It scarcely needs saying that family gatherings must have been fraught affairs.
Zeus is often described as clever and strategic, but he is soon thwarted twice by the wily Titan Prometheus. Hesiod is obviously looking for a story that explains why his fellow Greeks sacrifice the bones of an animal to the gods, and keep the choice cuts of meat for themselves. Given that sacrifice should presumably involve the loss of something good, and given that the bones are not the best bit of a dead ox, an explanation is required. So Hesiod tells us that, at a place called Mekone, Prometheus performed some sleight of hand. Given the task of dividing meat into a portion for the gods and one for mortals, he hides the meat beneath the ox’s stomach and offers it to Zeus, and arranges the bones for men under a piece of glistening fat. Zeus complains that his portion looks the less appetizing and Prometheus explains that Zeus has first pick, so should choose whichever portion he prefers. The king of the gods makes his choice and only afterwards sees that he has been deceived: mortals get the good stuff and the gods are stuck with a pile of bones.