Prometheus’ second piece of trickery is outright theft: he steals fire （which belongs to the gods） and shares it with mortals. He is famously punished for this by being tied to a rock and having his liver pecked out by an eagle. His immortality means that his liver grows back, so the whole grisly business can begin anew each day. Zeus is so incensed by the improvement in mortal lives which fire has brought that he decides to give us an evil （kakon）6 to balance things out. He gets Hephaestus to mould from the earth the likeness of a young woman. The goddess Athene dresses the unnamed maiden in silver clothes and gives her a veil and a golden crown, decorated with images of wild animals. When Hephaestus and Athene have finished their work, they show the kalon kakon, ant’agathoio7 – beautiful evil, the price of good – to the other gods, who realize that mortal men will have no device or remedy against her. From this woman, Hesiod says, comes the whole deadly race of women. Always nice to be wanted.
For a story which is told in so few words, this takes a lot of unpacking. Firstly, why doesn’t Hesiod use Pandora’s name? Secondly, is Hesiod really saying that women are a separate race from men? In which case, Pandora is very different from Eve: Adam and Eve will be the ancestors of all future men and women alike, but Pandora will be the antecedent of women alone. Thirdly, where’s her jar, or box, or whatever? Again, we’ll have to wait for Hesiod’s second, longer version to find out more. And fourthly, what do we find out about Pandora herself? She’s autochthonous, i.e. made of the earth itself. She’s designed and created by the gods’ master craftsman, Hephaestus, and decorated by the cunning and skilled Athene. We know Pandora is beautiful. But what is she actually like? We get only one phrase which might tell us, before Hesiod gets side-tracked explaining how women will only want you if you aren’t poor, and comparing them unfavourably to bees. As Pandora is taken out to be shown to the other gods, who will marvel at how perfectly made she is, she delights in her dress – kosmo agalomenēn.8 It’s as though Hesiod has been charmed by this young woman, even as he is describing her as evil and deadly. Just created, and she’s taking innocent pleasure in having been given a pretty frock.
Hesiod’s second, more detailed version of the story is in Works and Days. This poem is largely written as a rebuke to his indolent brother, Perses, proving that the poet’s passive-aggression isn’t limited to women. Siblings are also in his hexametric firing line. Once again, Zeus is angered by Prometheus’ theft, exclaiming ‘I will give them an evil as the price of fire’ – ‘anti puros dōsō kakon’。 He goes on to say that Pandora will be an evil ‘in which all men will delight, and which they will all embrace.’9 Again, he orders Hephaestus to do the hard work of creating; Pandora will be made from earth and water and given human voice and strength, but she will have the face and form of an immortal goddess. Athene is charged with teaching her to weave and Aphrodite must give her golden grace, painful desire and limb-gnawing sufferings （these latter two characteristics are presumably the feelings Pandora will provoke in men, but they are integral to her very being）。
The gods rush to do Zeus’ bidding. Indeed, more gods get involved: the Graces, Persuasion and the Hours all help with golden and floral decorations. The god Hermes gives her a doglike mind （this isn’t a compliment: the Greeks didn’t love dogs in the way that we do） and a dishonest nature. He is also responsible for both her voice and her name: ‘he called the woman Pandora, because all the gods who live on Mount Olympus gave her a gift, a calamity to men.’10 It is also Hermes, as the messenger of the gods, who takes Pandora away from the immortal realm and delivers her to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, as a gift. Prometheus （whose name literally means ‘foresight’） had warned his brother not to accept any gifts from Zeus. Epimetheus’ name means ‘hindsight’， and perhaps this is why he forgets that a present from Zeus might be something other than a box tied up with ribbon. So Epimetheus receives Pandora and the carefree life of mortals is at an end. Before this point, Hesiod explains, men had lived on the earth free from evils, free from hard work and from disease. But once Pandora takes the huge lid off her jar, that is all over, and mournful cares are now spread among mortals. Only Hope （Elpis）11 remains inside, retained under the lip of the jar, her unbroken home.
This longer version of Pandora’s beginnings answers some questions and raises several more. Pandora is a gift – literally: she is given by Hermes to Epimetheus. She is also all-gifted, insofar as many gods have contributed to her creation, giving her different qualities and skills. This part of her story perhaps reminds us of Sleeping Beauty, in which a baby is granted various positive qualities by invited fairies before a malevolent gatecrasher throws a spanner in the works by gifting her the prospect of death by spindle （commuted to an enormously long nap）。 But Pandora isn’t a baby when she receives these gifts, she is a parthenos: a maiden, a young woman of marriageable age. So these are not future qualities being bestowed on her, but immediately visible, audible ones: a voice, a dress, skill at weaving. There is a temptation to read her name as meaning ‘all-gifted’ （pan – ‘all’， dora comes from the verb didomi – ‘I give’）。 But the verb in Pandora’s name is active, not passive: literally she is all-giving rather than all-gifted. As an adjective in Greek, pandora is usually used to describe the earth, the all-giving thing which sustains life. There is an Athenian kylix （a wine cup） from around 460 BCE, attributed to the Tarquinia Painter, which is now in the British Museum and which appears to depict the scene Hesiod describes. The figures of Athene and Hephaestus stand to either side of a stiff Pandora, still seemingly more clay than woman. She is becoming a parthenos, but she is not yet finished, like a doll being dressed up by the skilful hands of the gods. Her name on this pot is given as Anesidora, meaning ‘she who sends up gifts’， much as the earth sends up the shoots of plants which will feed us and our livestock. So Pandora’s intrinsic generosity is erased if we think of her only as gifted.