Pandora’s Box: No Jar in the Theogony, One in Works and Days

Which tellings are compared here?

The comparison takes two passages, both read in the English of Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1884–1924), whose Greek text and translation appeared in 1914; the translation is Project Gutenberg 348. His translation prints line ranges at the start of each section, and those ranges are the coordinates used on this page. Because both poems appear in one volume by one translator, no difference between the two passages comes from a change of translator. His English can still vary where the Greek does not.

• Hesiod, Theogony, lines 507–616. The section on the sons of Iapetus, Prometheus’s trick at Mecone, and the woman Zeus sends in return. Evelyn-White prints it as nine sections, from lines 507–543 to lines 613–616; the woman herself fills lines 561–612.
• Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 42–105. The story of fire and the jar, which Evelyn-White prints as six sections, from lines 42–53 to lines 90–105.

The diagram at the top of the page shows those 15 sections; the same information as a table follows, with a yes wherever a section mentions the detail in Evelyn-White’s English. The shaping column marks only the section where the god actually forms her, not Zeus’s order to do so in Works and Days 60–68.

The 15 sections and what each mentions, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Evelyn-White’s Hesiod, Project Gutenberg 348, retrieved 2026-11-04

Each passage is what this site calls a one-evening text: a stretch of a named edition with line numbers, not the myth itself. Single Greek line numbers on this page come from Evelyn-White’s own Greek text as the Perseus Digital Library encodes it; the Greek words themselves are quoted only briefly.

The two brothers at the centre of both passages are introduced in the Theogony. Iapetus has four sons, among them “clever Prometheus, full of various wiles,” and “scatter-brained Epimetheus,” who “from the first was a mischief to men who eat bread,” because he was the first to accept the woman from Zeus (507–543). That clause is the only mention of Epimetheus in the Theogony section, and in the Greek it comes 60 lines before the woman is made, at line 511 against line 571.

Evelyn-White did not think both poems had the same author: in his introduction he calls the Works and Days the oldest of the Hesiodic poems, the “glorious song” the Muses taught Hesiod, puts it at about the middle of the ninth century BC, and places the Theogony perhaps a century later. He reads the Theogony’s lines about Hesiod and the Muses (22–23) as a later poet’s tradition about Hesiod. The title of this page follows the usual practice of calling both poems Hesiod’s.

What does the Theogony give her?

The Theogony reaches the woman through Prometheus. At Mecone he divides an ox so as to fool Zeus, Zeus withholds fire, Prometheus steals it in a hollow fennel stalk, and Zeus answers with something made “as the price of fire” (lines 561–584). The poem never names her: she is “the woman” and “the maiden,” first mentioned in passing as the gift Epimetheus took from Zeus (507–543).

Both poems describe her making in some of the same words. Evelyn-White’s English differs slightly between the two, yet the Greek behind his “shy maiden” and “modest maid” is one and the same line.

The name arrives at the end of that second passage, and the Works and Days explains it: “he called this woman Pandora, because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread” (lines 69–82), and Evelyn-White’s note glosses the name as “The All-endowed.”

The Works and Days also gives Zeus a motive in his own voice. He laughs aloud after he speaks, and the gifts he orders are not all kind: Athene is to teach her needlework, Aphrodite to shed grace and “cruel longing” on her, and Hermes to put in her “a shameless mind and a deceitful nature” (60–68).

‘Son of Iapetus, surpassing all in cunning, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire—a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be. But I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.’

translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White · Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 54–59, 1914, Project Gutenberg 348

In the Theogony there is nothing for her to open. When she is brought out, gods and men marvel at “that which was sheer guile” (585–589), and the poem moves straight on to what she means for men, with no jar, box or casket for her anywhere in the section.

Where does the jar appear?

The jar comes in the last section of the Works and Days passage. Epimetheus has forgotten Prometheus’s warning never to accept a gift from Zeus (83–89), and the next lines say what the woman does. Before this, the passage says, people “lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness.”

But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds.

translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White · Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 90–105, 1914, Project Gutenberg 348

The Greek word is pithos, a large storage jar.

In Evelyn-White’s Greek text it occurs three times in the passage, at lines 94, 97 and 98, and three more times later in the poem, at lines 368, 815 and 819, where it is simply the farm’s storage jar: “On the fourth day open a jar,” the calendar advises (819–821). The Theogony, across all 1,022 numbered lines, has no form of the word. The grid below counts a container only inside the checked passage, so those three farm jars do not change any of its cells.

The six lines with the word for jar, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Perseus Digital Library Greek text of Hesiod (ed. Evelyn-White 1914), retrieved 2026-11-04

The poem never introduces the jar, saying nothing of where it came from, who filled it, or whether it arrived with her; the woman simply opens it. Evelyn-White’s footnote to the line fills that gap for the reader: “The jar or casket contained the gifts of the gods mentioned in l.82.” His gloss, not Hesiod’s text, is the one place in the volume where a casket appears.

What stays inside the jar?

In the Works and Days, one thing stays behind when the lid comes off. Hope, Elpis in the Greek, remains “under the rim of the great jar,” because the lid comes down before she can fly out (Greek lines 96–98). The rest, in Evelyn-White’s words, “countless plagues, wander amongst men,” and diseases come silently, “for wise Zeus took away speech from them” (90–105). The jar is how the poem explains why that earlier life ended.

The passage does not say whether Hope stays in to help people or is withheld from them. It says only that the lid of the jar stopped her “by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus,” and the grid below records her as present in the jar without deciding what her staying means.

Illustration

Motif grid: what Hesiod’s two poems keep

Each motif was defined before any cell was filled, with what counts as present and which specific changes count as transformed. A cell marked absent means only that the checked section does not contain the motif, not that it is missing from the rest of the poem or from Greek tradition.

The 16 cells, with line numbers and quotations, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Evelyn-White’s Hesiod (Project Gutenberg 348) and the Perseus Digital Library Greek text, retrieved 2026-11-04

n = 2 texts checked: Hesiod, Theogony, lines 507–616, and Works and Days, lines 42–105, in Evelyn-White’s 1914 translation, with Greek line numbers from his Greek text. Of the 16 cells, 11 are present, 4 absent in the checked text, 1 transformed and 0 undetermined. The definitions are a separate download: the eight motif definitions as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Once Upon a Version, motif definitions, 2026-11-04.

Three motifs are present in both passages: the god who shapes her, the fire she is the price of, and Epimetheus, who receives her. The Works and Days has all eight, while the four motifs missing from the Theogony are the name and everything to do with the jar.

The one transformed cell follows the definitions table: in the Theogony, the harm Zeus intends is not let out of anything; the poem makes the woman and the women descended from her the harm itself, comparing them to drones fed by working bees (590–612). That is the poem’s claim about the woman it invents, and the grid records where the poem places the harm, not whether the claim is fair.

Later ancient tellings are left out because no public-domain text of them could be read in full for this page, so the grid stops at Hesiod’s two passages.

How did the jar become a box?

Neither poem has a box, and neither does Evelyn-White’s Greek text, so the box belongs to later tellers. By Dora and Erwin Panofsky’s account in Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), the change goes back to the Dutch humanist Erasmus. This page has not read Erasmus’s text, so the claim stays theirs.

What the page can show is a box or casket in a few later works. Evelyn-White, translating the jar in 1914, still glossed it as a “jar or casket,” and two nineteenth-century painters shown on this page gave Pandora a casket or a chest. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted her with a small box from which red smoke escapes, and Walter Crane laid her across a closed chest. Crane’s chest is shut and she lies over it, so the painting shows neither an opening nor anything escaping.

The box keeps the lid and the escape of the earlier story, but it changes the scale of the container. A pithos is the farm’s great storage jar, the kind Hesiod’s calendar tells farmers to open on the fourth day. A casket fits in her hands, as it does in Rossetti’s painting, and with it the story moves from the storeroom to her keeping.

What do the two poems not share?

Read together, the two passages part ways soon after the woman is made, although three Greek lines are word for word the same apart from punctuation: Zeus’s address to the son of Iapetus (Theogony 559, Works and Days 54), and two lines about the maiden’s likeness and Athena dressing her (572–573 and 71–72).

The three shared Greek lines, by line number, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Perseus Digital Library Greek text of Hesiod (ed. Evelyn-White 1914), retrieved 2026-11-04

Beyond those lines the passages diverge, because only the Works and Days names her, gives her a jar, lets her open it and keeps Hope inside. Only the Theogony turns from the woman to marriage, saying that a man who avoids it reaches old age with no one to tend him (590–612). The two poems agree on why Zeus sent her and on who received her, and on almost nothing that happened after she arrived.

The endings are the one other place where they agree, and they agree in wording as well as sense. The Theogony closes its section with “So it is not possible to deceive or go beyond the will of Zeus” (613–616), and the Works and Days closes the jar story with “So is there no way to escape the will of Zeus” (90–105). Both poems end the woman’s story as a lesson about the will of Zeus rather than about her.

Shared lines and motifs are counted here, not traced to a common source. The same caution runs through Orpheus and Eurydice in five ancient texts, another myth in this section whose best-known detail depends on which text is opened. A similar motif, with no borrowing claimed, appears in Sleeping Beauty, where one of thirteen fairies at a feast for a newborn girl brings the harm.

Hesiod, in the poem Evelyn-White thought was his, tells the jar story in verses addressed to his brother Perses, as a reason why people must work for a living. In the Works and Days, the gods have hidden the means of life (42–53), and the jar explains what is loose in the world once the lid comes off.