Pandora’s Box
After being outwitted once too often, Zeus decides to spite Prometheus by ruining the race of men.
After being outwitted once too often, Zeus decides to spite Prometheus by ruining the race of men.
In everyday speech, a Pandora’s Box is any circumstance that risks releasing a series of unpredictable and harmful consequences. The original myth, however, as told by Homer’s contemporary Hesiod, is considerably more subtle than this, delighting to raise more questions than it even attempts to answer.
IT is said that men were first formed from clay by the Titan Prometheus, and that Athene breathed life into them. Zeus was jealous, and though he did not stop men living in ease upon the hills, for in this Golden Age there was none of the toil and sickness we know today, he resolved never to let men have fire. Undeterred, Prometheus stole sparks from the chariot of the sun and brought them to men inside a fennel stalk,* for which Zeus in his wrath bound him to a rock in the Caucasus for ever, where an eagle fed daily upon his liver.*
Zeus was not yet finished. He engaged Hephaestus to fashion a new clay figure, a woman (and as yet men had no women), as heartbreakingly lovely as the goddesses who then lavished on her every gift and allurement. She was named Pandora, all-gifts, and the Titan Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother, was the lucky fellow to whom Zeus presented her.*
In the 6th century AD, two Greek monks smuggled silkworms out from China to Constantinople in bamboo sticks, much as Prometheus smuggled fire to men with his hollowed-out fennel reed. Later on raids by Arabs, Normans and Crusaders forced the Greek silk merchants to seek refuge in Italy, and from there the technique was brought to England by John Lombe in the 17th century, after he went undercover to discover the Italians’ secrets.
Prometheus was rescued eventually by Heracles. See Heracles and the Garden of the Hesperides.
Prometheus means ‘foresighted’, and Epimetheus means ‘hindsighted’ with the overtones of being (not very) wise after the event.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Why did Zeus punish Prometheus?