Pandora’s Box: The Gift That Brought Trouble to Humanity

Imagine a world without disease. No painful illnesses. No exhausting labour. And no misery. Human beings lived without many of the troubles that have become part of human existence.

Then someone opened a container. And everything changed.

According to Greek mythology, the trouble began with Prometheus. Prometheus had defied Zeus by stealing fire from the gods and giving it to human beings.

Zeus was furious.

Prometheus would be punished for his defiance. But Zeus also decided that humanity would pay for accepting the gift.

His plan began with a woman. Zeus summoned Hephaestus, the god of fire and the forge, and commanded him to fashion a beautiful woman from earth and water.

The gods then gave her different gifts. Athena taught her weaving skills and handiwork. Aphrodite gave her beauty and irresistible charm. Hermes gave her cunning and persuasive speech.

She was called Pandora. Her name means “all-gifted” or “endowed with all gifts,” because the gods had contributed to her creation.

Zeus then sent Pandora to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. But there was a problem. Prometheus had already warned his brother:

Never accept a gift from Zeus.

Epimetheus ignored the warning. Captivated by Pandora, he welcomed her into his home.

According to the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, Pandora was the first woman, created by the gods as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity. And with her came a mysterious container: a large, sealed storage jar.

What was inside it? Why was it there? And what would happen if it was opened?

Later storytellers would portray Pandora as a woman who was too curious to know what was in the jar. But the earliest surviving Greek account does not tell us why she opened the jar. It simply tells us that she did. And when Pandora lifted the lid, the evils that had been contained inside escaped into the world.

Sickness.

Hardship.

Pain.

Countless troubles that human beings had not previously known flew out and scattered everywhere.

Pandora quickly replaced the lid. But it was too late. Everything had escaped. Everything except one thing: Hope. Hope remained inside.

And that creates one of the most fascinating questions in the entire story.

Why was hope kept there?

Was hope another evil from which humanity was protected? Or was hope preserved for human beings so that, despite all the suffering now in the world, they would always have something that allowed them to endure?

People have debated that question for centuries.

But Pandora left us something else: an expression.

Today, if you open Pandora’s box, you do something that seems small or manageable but unleashes a large number of complicated problems that are difficult or impossible to control.

You might say:

Changing that one clause in the agreement could open a Pandora’s box of legal problems.

Or:

The investigation opened a Pandora’s box of allegations nobody had expected.

But there is something many people who use the expression do not know. Pandora never actually had a box. In Hesiod’s ancient Greek account, the container was a large jar. The familiar “box” appeared much later in the history of the story, after the Greek word for the large storage jar was rendered as a different kind of container. Yet the mistake survived.

Nobody says:

“Don’t open a Pandora’s jar.”

We say:

“Don’t open Pandora’s box.”

So an ancient Greek story gave us an expression that has survived for centuries, with the wrong container.

And perhaps that makes the story even harder to forget.

Open Pandora’s box, and you may release far more trouble than you ever imagined.

Just remember: Pandora didn’t open a box.