DISTURBING Secrets Hidden in Pandora's Box

3,000 years ago, there was a box that held the secrets of the universe, and it was sealed shut and it sat away. And when one woman lifted the lid, she unleashed the horrors inside on all of humanity. Disease, murder, savagery, and so much more. This is the story of Pandora's Box. But, just like the box itself, the story isn't what it appears to be, because over centuries, it's been retold, rewritten, and reshaped so many times that the original has almost disappeared. So today we're going to go back to the very first version, to find out who really doomed humanity and why evil was being kept inside of such a box, and to see the one thing that actually got left inside. If you were interested in Greek history and mythology, and what these stories say about antiquity and about us as human beings, well this is the episode for you. So sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up, dude? Welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagdon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Wednesday we explore the most interesting fascinating controversial stories from all history from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here, as I sit in this very tent, and I try to figure out everything that has ever happened. And there's a lot of stuff. There's stuff happening every single day, and more history is getting written as we speak, so we have no time to waste before we jump in to Pandora's Box, literally. Now, before we do that, I just want to say a few things. First, thank you for tuning in, because every time you click or comment on an episode, it truly, I mean it fills my sales with wind, and it helps keeps the show growing, and it keeps the lights on the tent, and it keeps the fire burning here in the campsite. I'm blown away. That's so many people are interested in the bizarre niche, mysterious versions of history, and try to figure out what's going on here. Every time we do an episode, I'm like, oh, there's no way they're going to watch this. And then you guys do, you come on out and you tune in to the things that I'm fascinated by, and truly it's the coolest thing ever, and it's one of the lights of my life, so thank you. And you know what else is the light of my life? They got in my right. The Greek freak himself, and perhaps my very first Greek fantasy before I ever heard about Zeus or Dionysus or any of these folks. And his name is Christos Pistachioppitus. How are you? That's a new one. Thank you very much. I was working on that. That sounds so very sweet. Thank you very much. Of course, Christos, you're a great guy. I'm glad that you're here, and I'm sorry that I've been shushing you all this time. Why not? I don't buy it. No, it's a, yeah, you shouldn't buy it. I was blowing you in. It's called the rope of dope, right? Let's talk about Pandora's Box. Now before we jump in, we have to understand who first told this story. And who is Pandora? What is this whole myth? You probably heard of Pandora's Box. You've heard people say like, ah, you open Pandora's Box. That typically means you unleash something. You can't get it back in. What's done is done. The past is history. That's why we call it the present. Is that what they say? Yeah. Pandora's Box is a euphemism. But no one really actually knows where it comes from. Well, today you're going to find out because the myth didn't come down from out of Olympus. I mean, unless you're like one of those people that's like an actual like Greek pagan still to this day, Christos. Yep, they exist. But it didn't probably come down from that. It actually came from a Greek farmer named Hesiod. And he was writing somewhere in like 700 BC, give or take, and a tiny little village called Ascrow at the foot of Mount Helicone. And Hesiod did not love his hometown. He describes Ascrow as a miserable place. Bad in the winter, brutal in the summer, and never good at any point in between, which is kind of funny to hear someone writing in 700 BC like do my hometown socks. It's nothing but strip malls and poverty and drug addicts. Basically what he's saying about Ascrow. It's kind of funny. Now, basically, his father had moved there from across the GNC running from poverty, trying to find a new life. And it sounds like the family kind of traded one type of hardship for another. Now, here's how Hesiod says that he became a poet. You understand this is kind of just like a low class guy living in a pretty crappy area. Well, one day he was outtending sheep on the slopes of Helicone, which am I pronouncing Helicone correctly? Pretty good. How would you say it? You wouldn't pronounce the H, Helicone, Helicone. Well, I'm going to say the H. And basically, he's tending the sheep when the muses themselves appeared to him, handed him a laurel staff, and breathed a divine voice into him so that he could sing about the gods. And that's the story. Now, to this day, only two of his poems survive, and they are both massively important. Now, you maybe have heard of his name, and it's probably because of these poems. The first is called Theogony. And it literally means the birth of the gods. It's the story of like the big cosmic family tree, chaos, the Titans, the war in the heavens, Zeus taking the throne. If you watch the episode on Zeus, you've basically already heard this whole poem top to bottom, and it's one of our main sources for the whole succession story. I know I referenced a lot of videos, Chris is over here laughing at me. I want the people. If you don't know, you can fill in the knowledge gaps and come along journey with me. Okay. Check out that episode after that. Anyway, the second poem is called Works and Days. And this one is way more personal. So Works and Days is a poem addressed to his yod's brother, and this was a guy named Perseus. And according to his yod, Perseus had cheated him. Basically after their father had died, Perseus walked away with more than his fair share of the inheritance with a little help from like local lords that his yod called gift eaters. So in other words, these are like judges who took bribes. So based on the stories like these two brothers, their dad dies, they're supposed to get 50/50 split. And Perseus goes to the judges and kind of swindles them or gets his way and is able to take like the vast chunk of the inheritance. And now apparently Perseus had burned through all the money and was now crawling back home, asking for some help or for some more money. And he's basically wrote an epic poem that boils down to like, Hey, F you get a job. That's hilarious. Like I just I love ancient history because it's like, dude, we're the exact same. Imagine you and your brother, your dad dies, you split the house 50/50, whoops, nope, your brother takes all of it sells the house burns through all the money on like, you know, I don't even know like cars and women and drugs. And the rest of it, he just wastes and then he comes back to you and he's like, Hey, I need some more money. What would you say? You'd be like, No, now maybe you wouldn't write a whole epic poem about it. But that's why you and his yod are different. So the poem is part like manual about like farming. It's part like sermon and part family feud and it talks about things like when to plow, when to harvest, how to treat your neighbors while your brothers are lying bag of crap. And how to, you know, how the gods will punish like lazy crooked people and then right near the beginning, there's a story that explains why human life is so hard in the first place. And that story is Pandora. And now, keep one detail in mind as we go forward through this. This is a poem that opens with a fight over gifts, gifts to crooked judges, gifts that poison things and that theme is going to be very important and really contextualizes this whole story. Now, he's actually tells this myth twice. He tells it once in theogony and then once in works and days and there are two versions that actually don't match, which is why the story is kind of like told and retold and all sorts of different ways, but we'll get to that in a second. So to sum up thus far, there is one grumpy farmer, one ungrateful brother, two poems and two different stories of the first woman, aka Pandora. One of them has no name, the other one has a jar, but let's go back before either of them back to the night that sets up this whole story. Okay, when gods and men still sat at the same table and a war starts between the heavens and earth. Now, the villain part of the story or the hero depending on who you ask is Prometheus. Prometheus is the son of a Titan, which already makes him a touchy subject for Zeus. Remember, Zeus only holds power because he overthrew the Titans. So he spends pretty much, you know, his whole reign worried about someone doing the same thing to him. Like I already mentioned that I've said about Zeus, but Zeus kind of like takes over the throne and then is living super paranoid the rest of his reign according to Greek mythology. So Prometheus's name means something like forethought, meaning like he's the planner, he's the clever one. And in Theogony, the story kicks off at a place called mecony back when gods and humans were still kind of settling the terms of their relationship. Like who gets what, who gets to control, you know, which places and like who owns whom and the humans need someone to negotiate for them. So Prometheus basically steps up as their representative. Now, as the story goes, he slaughters a great ox and divides it into two portions. Zeus gets to choose one for the gods and whatever Zeus doesn't pick goes to humanity forever. So in one pile, he wraps all of the good, really edible meat inside the stomach of the ox, which is like the least appetizing looking thing imaginable. And then in the other pile, he takes just the bare bones and then wraps them in this glistening white fat and makes it look like a really rich cut of meat. And so you have these two options, the really good meat that looks gross or the bones that look like really good meat. Now Zeus picks the fat aka the disguised bones, which means that humanity walks away with all the really good meat. And that according to Hesiod is why ever since when Greeks made sacrifices, they burned the bones and fat on the altar for the gods and they kept the meat for themselves to eat. It's a myth that explains their ritual and honestly is like pretty good deal for humans overall. But then Hesiod in the text says something kind of weird. He insists that Zeus knew what he was doing. That the king of the gods saw through the trick the whole time and he chose the bones anyway because he was all planning evils for morals like the whole time. Now you could read that as the poet kind of protecting Zeus's reputation, right? Again, he's writing on behalf of the like the gods that people actively worship, right? And so the all-knowing king of the gods can't just get fueled or can't get fooled by like a stupid trick from, you know, Prometheus. But then you read it that way in light of knowing what's coming next. It definitely sounds like Zeus knew what he was doing. He wasn't being tricked. He was playing like the long game. So first he chose the bones and the fat wrapped in like like the good casing. And then his next move was to hide fire from humanity. But once again, Prometheus, a good friend of mankind, a representative trying to help out all the humans, depending on who you ask, he's always trying to be one step ahead of Zeus. He steals it right back and he smuggles fire down to earth inside the hollow stock of a giant fennel plant. And the detail there isn't random. What's cool is that the dry pith inside a fennel stock can actually hold a smoldering ember for a really long time. This was like an actual practical ancient way to carry fire. And it's something that a Greek farmer would have absolutely recognized and like understood. So thanks to Prometheus, humanity has fire, which is a obviously a very important story to like Greek mythology. You've probably heard the story Prometheus before and bring fire to humanity. And with that, humanity can now cook foods and do metal work. And it's like the beginning of basically civilization. And Zeus hears about this and laughs. So in the poem works in days, he turns to Prometheus and I'm paraphrasing only slightly here. He says, you're pleased with yourself for stealing fire, right? That's okay. Sure. You're, oh, look at Prometheus. You did it. But it's going to be a massive disaster for you and for everyone after an exchange for fire. I will give humans an evil one that they will delight in wrapping their arms around their own ruin. Think about that. Zeus is like, Oh, you want to steal fire and give it to the humans? We'll watch this. I'm going to give them something that they're going to love, but we'll also destroy them. Now as for Prometheus, as punishment, he gets chained to a pillar. And an eagle is now sent to eat his liver. But since he's immortal, the liver grows back every single night. And the eagle returns every day. It's one of like the most famous punishments in all of mythology. It's kind of sissifous in a way. And eventually it ends when Hercules also known as Heracles, depending on the version you read, shoots the eagle out of the sky. Now, before you file Prometheus away as a noble friend of humanity, notice what Hesiod is actually saying here. Every clever trick Prometheus plays is actually, it actually makes things worse for humanity. Like, he's a trickster. And humans are the ones who end up getting stuck with the consequences. I mean, you know, granted Prometheus also gets stuck with the consequences. But humanity doesn't even really know what they're doing. Like Prometheus just gives this thing to humanity. They're like, oh, this is great. And then humanity gets destroyed by it. So while Prometheus has chained to that rock, Zeus has already sent for his blacksmith and he's ordering something to be built. But it's not a weapon. Well, kind of not the one that you would expect because Zeus's long game is about to pay off. 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So the blacksmith in the story is called Hephaestus and he's the god of the forge. And Zeus gives him very specific instructions. He tells Hephaestus, "Hey, take Earth. Mix it with water. Give it a human voice and human strength and make its face like an immortal goddess." So the first woman in Hesiod's story isn't born. She's manufactured. She's forged, sculpted out of what clay like a pot, which is a detail that's worth remembering once we actually get to like Pandora's Box. And then all of Olympus pitches in, kind of like this divine assembly line. So Athena dresses her and teaches her weaving. Aphrodite pours grace over her head along with painful longing and the kind of desire that like wears a person down. And the graces and the goddess persuasion hang golden necklaces around her. And then the hori, the goddesses of the seasons crown her with these spring flowers. And then of course, Hermes. The messenger god and patron of thieves gives her lies and flattering words and a thieving nature. And what Hesiod calls the mind of a dog. Now in Greek, that's a pretty insulting thing. In English, it's pretty insulting. But specifically in Greek, that's an insult that essentially just translate to calling someone like shameless. And then Zeus gives her a name. And the name he gives her is Pandora. It means all gifted because every god on Olympus gave her a gift. Now remember that detail from earlier? How this whole story got started? This is a poem that begins with a man like furious about bribes, the gifts that corrupt justice and cost him his inheritance, like the actual story of Hesiod with his father and his brother proceeds, right? The punishment for all of humanity is a woman who is a gift beautiful and wrapped in gold and flowers and poisonous kind of by design. And that's the version that Hesiod is trying to tell us that there's actually evidence that Pandora may have once meant something very different. So in the British Museum, there is this like Athenian drinking cup from roughly like four or seventies BC. And painted on the inside, you can see the making of Pandora. So you actually see like Athena and Hephesta's dressing and crowning like this stiff statue like woman. And the painter even labeled everyone by name. So we know exactly who they're talking about. Except the woman isn't labeled Pandora. She's labeled and Esadora, which basically translates to she who sends up gifts. Think about that, sends them up as in from below out of the ground. And Esadora was also a title used for the earth herself and for Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. And some scholars have argued that long before Hesiod had even told the story, Pandora may have been an earth goddess, the one who gives all gifts like crops and grain, everything that rises out of the soil that goes up, not a gift handed down by the gods. So to be clear, that's just a theory from historians. It's not a settled fact. But if it is right, then Hesiod took a figure associated with abundance and then twisted her whole story into kind of being the opposite and to being the whole reason that life is hard and difficult, almost like kind of introducing the problem of evil. And here's one more twist to kind of reckon with in all of this about a generation after that cup was painted. The sculpture Fidias created the colossal gold and ivory statue of Athena that stood inside the Parthenon, perhaps the most sacred and most expensive work of art in all of Athens and carved on the pedestal, rated eye level for everyone who walked in was a scene of birth, but not a birth of Athena, the birth of Pandora. And we know this because the Greek traveler, Pasinia, saw it with his own eyes centuries later and the Roman writer Pliny adds that 20 gods were shown gathering around her. So why would Athens put the woman who supposedly ruined humanity at the feet of its own patron goddess Athena? Well, historians don't really know, they still argue about it and it's a really good question. But it does tell us that Greek history probably didn't see Pandora the way Hesiod did, which is pretty interesting. You see, Hesiod's view of Pandora is extremely harsh. So in his poem Theogony, the unnamed first woman is called a beautiful evil. And from her, he says comes the whole race of women, which is kind of sort of funny and misogynistic at the same time. He basically compares women to drones and beehive, lounging inside and like eating up everything that the worker bees bring home. And then two seconds later, he complicates his own argument. He says that a man who avoids marriage reaches old age with no one to care for him, and when he dies, distant relatives carve up his property. And even a man who gets a good wife, he says finds evil constantly mixed with the good. So Hesiod's view is not simply like women are bad. It's a world you built around a farmer's deepest anxieties, which is like food and labor and property and health and like who inherits your farm after you're gone, all the kind of stuff that would be important to a farmer, which remember, proceeds Hesiod's brother. This was probably exactly what he was worried about at this time with his own family. So Hesiod's story about Pandora became one of the Western world's most durable ways to understand human suffering, which is gotta blame the chicks. So it's a tried and true method. When things are not going well, you're like, dude, it's the chicks fault. It's women's fault. We gotta handle these women. But it's worth knowing that this one poet's story from one corner of Ancient Greece isn't a universal statement about how the Greeks thought about women in ancient times. And the statue in the Parthenon is proof of that. And also the other ancient origin stories of Pandora being the goddess of abundance and whatnot are also proof of that as well. So it might just be his own sort of personal telling. Now it's not to discount Hesiod's story. It's just when you look at the context of where and how and why it was written. It tells us even more about what it might have really meant to Hesiod. So anyway, just as some of the stories so far, Zeus got revenge for it from Ethiopia's stealing fire, the gods built a woman as a trap and gave her a name that may have once belonged to the earth itself. And now she's ready to be delivered. The only question is who would be foolish enough to open the door of this kind of evil goddess? So Hermes Escorts Pandora down from Olympus and brings her not to Prometheus, but to his brother, Epometheus. If Prometheus means forethought, then you can probably take a guess what Epometheus means, right? He's the afterthought, he's the guy who figures things out after it's too late. And Prometheus had warned him, "Hey, if Zeus ever comes down here and tries to give you a gift, don't open it. Don't trust Zeus. He's trying to destroy humanity. If one comes, send it back, or something terrible is going to happen to humanity." But of course, Epometheus takes the gift. Now, let's set the scene the way that Hesiod does in the poem. Before this moment, humans lived apart from evil. There was no back-breaking labor, there was no disease, none of the miseries that wary person down into old age. And then, in Epometheus's house, there is a big jar, it's called a pithos. Now, Hesiod doesn't say where it comes from, some say Pandora brought it with her, others say that it was already sitting in the house, the text just doesn't specify. But Pandora goes and lifts the lid. And the whole future of humanity is fundamentally changed forever. Now, stop for a second and compare that with the version that you probably heard growing up. Like, Pandora gets a box, a god tells her to never open it, her curiosity gets the better of her, she takes a peek inside, thus terrible things happen. Almost like kind of Adam and Eve-esque. But none of that is actually in Hesiod's story. There's no scene where anyone tells Pandora not to open it. She also never says that she did it out of curiosity. It actually doesn't give her a motive at all. She just takes the lid off, and then the poem tells us what the consequences are. We don't know why. But those details, like the warning, the curiosity, the guilt, those were added by later tellers. And those details really change a lot. They turn a story about God's punishment on humanity into a story about like one person, like one woman's personal failure. So what comes out of the jar? Hesiod doesn't give us a checklist like, oh, all of a sudden war and jealousy and labor and all this stuff. These countless miseries were scattered, set loose, amongst human beings. Now both the land and the sea are full of evils, and then the worst evil and the entire myth comes along. Disease, he says, now roam among people on their own by day and night bringing harm to mortals silently. Because Zeus took away their voices, like the disease is not the peoples. So now sickness doesn't announce itself. It doesn't knock. It just shows up at a village in total silence and you don't know when it's there and you don't know when it's inside you. And you can imagine for Hesiod, this is like the biggest fear that there is, right? A farmer in 700 BC with no germ theory, no medicine really to speak of, and living in close proximity to livestock where most of these diseases come from. And trying to wonder like, why did this neighbor get sick and this one didn't? It's basically a 700 BC understanding of like, why and how diseases work. But then Pandora puts the lid back on. It's in time to keep one thing inside and it stays there. Hesiod says in the text basically that this one thing stays in its unbreakable home under the rim of the jar, and it never makes it out. Now here's a detail that most of the retellings will skip. He says that she closes the lid by the will of Zeus, which is interesting that Zeus wanted this one specific thing to stay in the jar. And the thing is called elpus and it usually translates to hope. So how does that make sense? Let's break this down because this one line has kept scholars arguing for like literal centuries. So the word itself, elpus, is usually translated to hope and it's pretty fair. But in Greek, it's actually broader than our typical idea of hope. It can mean like excitement or expectation or anticipation or looking at what's coming, whether it's good or bad. So saying that hope stayed in the jar might actually be too narrow in scope. It would maybe be more accurate to say like expectations stayed in the jar, which is almost like more ominous. Now scholars agreed that there are basically three main ways to read this moment. Reading number one is that hope was saved for us. So a pethos, a storage jar, was basically a thing that you would use to keep everything that you would ever grow. So you would keep grain and oil in it so you had something to live on throughout the winter. So maybe hope is the one thing that's held back and preserved. And it's the ration that gets humanity through this new world of evils. Like everything terrible gets out, but at least we still have hope in our jar. Now there's reading number two that is hope was kept from us. So everything else goes into the world, but hope is locked inside, which would mean that humans get all the misery, but none of the hope, none of the anticipation, none of the expectation. And that's a pretty bleak kind of interpretation of this. But the problem with this reading is obvious. If hope is a good thing, why was it in a jar full of like evil things in the first place? So maybe this kind of hope shouldn't be interpreted as a good thing. Maybe it's more of like the expectation of the evils that are to come. And then of course, there's reading number three that hope is itself one of the evils. Maybe it wasn't sitting in the jar by accident. Maybe hope in the context of the story is the expectation that things will just kind of work themselves out, almost like a, you could say like a delusional kind of optimism, like a hope that's founded on nothing. And there's actually evidence for this one from Hesiod himself later in works and days. He scolds the lazy man who sits around waiting on empty hope instead of actually going in being like industrious and working his field. And who's the lazy man in the poem who keeps hoping that things will work out without actually doing the work? It's none other than his own brother, precise. So for a hard working farmer like Hesiod, expectation without effort is death. That is like the trap. That's what keeps you sitting on your porch while your crops die and you're sitting there like, oh, maybe it'll all work out. It's Hesiod's like, no, you got to get out there and and prove it. You got to make it work. So which is it? The truth is the ancient Greeks themselves didn't really agree because a little more than a century after Hesiod, the poet theognes flipped the entire thing around. Hope he wrote is the only good that God still left among humanity. The rest, right? Like trust, self-control, the graces. They've abandoned the earth and gone back to Olympus. And then centuries after that, the fable writer, Fabrius, he took it even further. And in his version, the jar is actually full of good things like every blessing Zeus meant to give humanity and then a foolish man, not a woman in his telling pops off the lid out of curiosity and then all the blessings fly back up to the gods and only hope is the thing that stays behind, promising that one day she'll return the good things that were then lost. So you can see how the story shifts for a different context. The same jar, sometimes different people and completely opposite contents and opposite outcomes. And in the famous play, Prometheus bound by the playwright and poet Eskolas, the chained titan brags that he gave mortals blind hopes so that they would stop for seeing their own deaths. I mean, it kind of depends how you read that, but like, is that really a gift? Even Homer had his own version of this idea. In the Iliad, Achilles tells the grieving king, Prime, that two jars sit on the floor of Zeus's palace, one full of good things and one full of evils. Some people get a mix from both and some people only ever get the bad one. Now the Greeks, it seems like depending on how you're reading this, just really thought about fate in terms of like jars, like fate is a, like almost a thing that you can possess that kind of just gets dumped on you, either good or bad or a mix. And then in 1878, a German philosopher who had started his career as a professor of ancient Greek picked up this exact passage and gave it the darkest, most like evil reading of all. And his name was Frederick Nietzsche. Now in his book, human all to human, Nietzsche argued that hope was the evil Zeus kept for last on purpose. Humans mistake hope for the greatest treasure of the world, he says, but Zeus gave it to them so that they wouldn't give up on life, no matter how much the other evils torment to them. Hope keeps you going so that you can just continue to go so that you can keep on suffering and being tormented by the evils of the world. In the other words, it's the worst evil of them all because it makes all the other evils last longer. Like it's almost like a fool's errand, like you give them hope so that they continue to persist and keep on suffering for a longer time and create even more suffering. It's like a cruel joke. Now plenty of classicists would argue that people have been overthinking the meaning of this whole thing the whole time and that Hesiod might not have been suggesting any type of philosophical system at all. And we're just kind of overlaying that he may simply have just been saying that human life is a mixture of misery and expectation and that's all there is to it. But that's honestly what makes the story so interesting because we don't know what Hesiod was suggesting or even if he was trying to suggest anything or say anything deeper. Others have found a deep philosophical meaning in it and that's also significant too and that's kind of the beauty of ancient poetry. So with all this context, the whole question we started with this episode kind of changes. Instead of wondering why Zeus put hope in a jar filled with evils, we're now forced to ask, is hope itself some type of evil? And at this point in the story, I guess there's not really a clear answer. What we do know is that at some point in history, the jar itself disappeared and something smaller actually took its place. But let's talk about this jar for a second before we go to the box. Because I think when most people hear jar, they picture like grillo's pickles or something. You know, they picture like a thing you twist on, twist off. But the Greek pathos is nothing like that. These jars are enormous. Somewhere as tall as like six feet and they were like thick and they were like partially sunk into the ground So like you could keep like food cool and so you would put like grain or olive oil or even wine So if for a family the pithoi in the storeroom was basically What they had to make it through the winter time like it didn't just hold food though So in Greece during Kesea's era people sometimes would use pithoi as coffins So like a body would be curled up inside and then the jar would be like laid into the ground So in the Greek context at this time a pithos was symbolically the thing that like kept you alive It's like okay. We have all of our food in here. We're gonna live through the winter But also kind of the thing you may be buried in so it kind of almost has like a double Kind of meaning and it gets even weirder because every year Athens held a spring festival called and Estiria and the first day of the festival was called pithoi, which literally means the jar opening Officially is when it's basically when people would like crack open the new wine from last year's harvest and they would like have a big You know day of drinking But the anthestiria also has a darker side during the festival Spirits called the Kettos were thought to wander freely through the city and people Supposedly chewed on buckthorn leaves and smeared pitch on their doorways to Keep out these evil spirits and when the festival ended they drove the spirits away with an old saying roughly They would say out the door spirits. It's not anthestiria anymore. Now they would obviously say it in Greek I don't I don't know how to speak Greek, but you go and I'm saying now What does any of this have to do with Pandora or Pandora's box? Well around the year 1900 a British Classicist named Jane Harrison thought that she'd found where Pandora's jar really came from and she connected it to This anthesiria festival and her logic kind of went like this a pea-thos holds food, right? grain olive oil, but it also would hold the dead and it would be used as a coffin So maybe the jar opening of the pathogia was at the time actually more about just wine Maybe it meant opening the grave jars and letting the dead roam around the city almost like Like a like a version of like Halloween in a way like a day of the dead, right? Her evidence is a fifth-century BC funeral flask now in Gina, Germany and on it Hermes the god who guided souls to the underworld stands over a huge buried pea-thos and Fluttering out of it our tiny winged people, which is how Greek artists would draw like spirits of the dead now to be clear Not every scholar agrees with this theory, but if Harrison is even partly right It does change this story of Pandora's box and think about what it means for a Hesia story as an ancient Greek a Woman lifts the lid of this massive jar and unseen things escape to wander amongst the living That wouldn't sound like a fairytale It would sound like the thing that you did every single spring right before you smeared pitch on your door and Chanted for these evil spirits to leave so then how did this huge Earthy jar get translated over time into like a dainty little box well the answer that most historians agree on is One of the most influential scholars of the Renaissance and his name is a Rasmus of Rotterdam So in the early 1500's a Rasmus published a massive best-selling collection of classical proverbs and Basically, he retold Pandora's story in Latin and he swapped Hesia's Greek pithos for the Latin word Pixus now a pixus is a tiny Like lidded like little box the kind like you would keep like Julian So why did he swap the word? Well, no one really knows for sure But one popular theory is that a Rasmus was mixing Pandora up with another myth The story of psyche who's handed a little box by the queen of the underworld and is told not to open it But then opens it anyway out of curiosity and falls into like a death-like sleep Now you can obviously see the crossover right like the warning the curiosity the forbidden lid That's psyche story and it may have accidentally crossed over into Pandora's much later However, it happened the box stuck through the rest of history and once Pandora had a little forbidden box The story became much easier to mortalize. So around the 1550's a French painter even titled a portrait of a woman Eva prima Pandora, which means Eve the first Pandora and emerged the Greek myth with the Bible's first woman So the two women who are always blamed for the fall of humanity are basically rolled into one painting Meanwhile the gods who designed her the farmers lazy brother who was warned and the jar that held both life and death all of that kind of faded away And the version that survives today is Probably not even her story at all when we say someone open Pandora's box We usually mean that they started something that can't be undone politicians talk about it with like Nuclear weapons scientists talk about like gene editing and people talk about all the time with AI, right? They're like oh, we're opening Pandora's box. There's even a jewelry brand called Pandora There's a streaming service called Pandora and the planet that the aliens live on in Avatar is also called Pandora So the thing that we remember most about Pandora is the evil that was let loose on the world We never really remember what was left inside the jar We don't even remember that it's a jar and that it wasn't a box the whole time and maybe That might be the whole point of the story that humanity's been missing for centuries So for 500 years we've pictured the same scene a woman a box and like this guilty kind of curious peak inside But remember in the original no one ever told her not to she was innocent of what she was doing Right like she was made by the gods and kind of brought to earth and then she opens a jar and then zoos Basically compels her to close it and keep hope inside and the one who was warned however was epimetheus the guy that was supposed to tell her not to do it And never did his brother told him plainly hate never accepted a gift from Zeus Prometheus tried to warn him and then when the most beautiful gift ever made showed up at his door What is a guy supposed to do say no to a beautiful goddess now Pandora didn't unleash evil on the world She was the trap built by the gods from the ground up like in a way Epimetheus is the one who took it Like you'd almost say like in the story of like the Trojan horse right like oh, it's the horse's fault It's like well the horse was just like the vessel now remember what his name means right epimetheus the afterthought the one who only understands once He's done what he's done way after it's too late which is kind of like maybe the moral of the whole thing I don't know if he's yet even meant it, but it's pretty funny right like human beings took fire from Prometheus before we would know what it would cost right like we split the atom we built machines that are maybe Sentient right now with AI and every single time we use the same phrase to describe what happens We say hey, we we're gonna open Pandora's box, but honestly, that's not even the moment that matters the most It was all over the second that Pandora entered the house the moment that something dazzling arrived and we said yes before we understood We were looking at that's the real thread that connects every version of this myth It was never really about curiosity or rebellion It was about mankind receiving something and accepting it before we really understood what it was Prometheus could see what was coming epimetheus could only see what was already done and the rest of us kind of live somewhere in between in a world full of like consequences behind us and Almost certainly more evil in chaos in the future and yet that is not the end of the story because there is still one thing Still waiting at the bottom of the jar and that's hope Now, what does that mean? I Guess we will find out and that ladies and gentlemen is a brief abridged retelling of the story of Pandora's box AKA Pandora's jar. I mean a fascinating story Like I've someone I think had written in like oh do something on Pandora's box. I was like what is that? It's crazy like most of the phrases that we'll use in English like I have a general idea of like where it comes from or what it means This one I had zero it is fascinating to me the parallels that exist with the Garden of Eden like I had never Really connected the two before or the lack there of What do you mean because they said Pandora wasn't advised against it? Right fair, but like for example in Erasmus's version where he's like, you know, there's a woman. She comes down She's curious. She wants to know what's in here. She opens it and destroys everything like that is kind of Eve story She's in the garden. She gets some advice from a serpent. She's like sounds pretty cool. She opens it humanity falls and In that telling like Adam is kind of Epimetheus Right like Epimetheus is like You know Prometheus tells Epimetheus like hey, don't take any guess from Zeus Adam is technically supposed to be like in charge of Eve and make sure she doesn't get any trouble and then Allows it to happen anyway. It's kind of a it's an interesting parallel that I've never heard before I haven't heard someone connect the story of Adam and Eve with the story of Pandora's box slash Prometheus slash Epimetheus Kind of fascinating. Yep. Could you pull up that image of Eve the first Pandora? From that like 1500s artist. It's a really interesting one I saw it only once when doing the research, but it's kind of cool like once you know the context like if you go to the museum and you look at this You're like oh, that's what it is It's an interesting painting. Have you ever seen it before? I haven't it's interesting in her right hand and this is I'm pulling from a art inspector website, but I wanted to look into it nude painting, which is important combining Christian and Greek mythological influences in her right hand. You have an apple. That's like the little thing kind of like in her armpit there And it's reminiscent of Eve's temptation at the center of the picture. You have Pandora's box and then the school Which she leans on is the Vanitas symbol calling the mind calling to the mind of the viewer's own transience basically like you're all gonna die and like the horrors of like evil that are gonna be like sort of uncovered. And the image is understood as an urgent warning not to give into the seductions and dangerousness of women. Kind of, uh, kind of blunt, right? Like it's like, oh, look at this beautiful woman. Look at this beautiful image of a woman. Like isn't the beauty of femininity just so profound? You think she's a baddie? I mean, sure. Why not? Especially for the time? Yes. Right. Like a, a nice, you know, kind of a curvy white girl. Mm-hmm. I'm just saying, it's kind of funny that you would look at this and like you'd be like, oh, what a, what a gorgeous image of a woman leaning on a school. And meanwhile the artist is like, just full on Andrew Tage. Just like dogs and women are gonna destroy everything. Kind of funny. Yeah. Combining in Greek and Christians. Kind of cool. I like that. Also that whole hope section that they had about Greeks. Yes. It's a really big topic. And, yeah. And, uh, so Elpis is what we refer to it as Elbita is what it is in Greek. Elbita. Yeah. And I don't know if I know this from Greek originally or if it's also in English, but, uh, Elbita, Bethenite Leftea is Hope dies last. Hope dies last. Yeah. I mean, that's obviously from Pandora. Yeah. That's so funny. And that's like a thing that people would say. Yeah. Like what would be the context that you would say that? And like, so a person has like a really bad hardship or like something they have to overcome. They go, hey, hope dies last. Like you can get through this. Yeah. And that's why hope remains at the bottom of the Pithos. Uh, now Nietzsche's interpretation of it is very insidious. That like Zeus is gonna punish humanity and by giving them hope, he can punish them for longer. That's nasty. Well, that didn't come out of the Pithos. But, oh, that's a good point. But maybe it's kept in the Pithos so the humanity can indulge on it on the opiate of delusional optimism. And then, you know, there's all these evils in the world, but yet we have the Pithos at home that we continue to to drink from to give us this hope that then we endure more hardship and pain and suffering. Nietzsche was a dark guy. Yeah. Right? Like dude, you could have made it nice. Give it a rest, man. I know. Well, he has some hope. Yeah. Right. Have a little bit. Have a sip of hope, dude. Have a little sip. It dies last. Exactly. Anyway, what do you guys think? Have you heard the story before? Is my retelling pretty accurate? If you're a Greek historian or a classicist or something and you know more about this than I do, please drop a comment. Let me know. I'm really enjoying these Greek deep dives. I'm truly uh, and not only do I enjoy it in them, but the fact that I have a real Greekman near me that can help me pronounce all the words is remarkable. So thank you for that. You got it? No time, Christos. Look, I want to say thanks to all the people for watching. I appreciate you all. If you like crazy, deep dives on mysteries, well, great news, camp guide on the play street. That's the main channel where I deep dive on all the craziest theories and I try to break down all the mysteries of the world and why people believe them where they come from and how true they really are. I also do an episode called Religion Camp or a show called Religion Camp where I deep dive in all the religions of the world and try to understand what people really believe. And if you like to rock with the history of valuable great news, we drop these episodes every single Wednesday here at History Camp. God bless you all. And I will see you in the future to talk about the past. Please.