Pandora: The First Woman Was a Work of Art

Beneath the gold-and-ivory Athena that Pheidias made for the Parthenon, there was a carved relief. The goddess herself rose more than ten metres into the dim interior of the temple, but the scene on her pedestal could be studied up close, and Pausanias, touring Greece in the second century CE, names it in a single phrase: the birth of Pandora. The first woman of Greek myth, in other words, was shown on the base of the most celebrated statue in the Greek world. It suits her. In the oldest telling of her story, Pandora is not born at all. She is made.

A maiden moulded from wet earth

Hesiod tells the tale twice, around 700 BCE, and both versions begin with a quarrel over fire. In the Theogony, Prometheus has cheated Zeus over the shares of a sacrificed ox and then stolen fire for mortals. Zeus replies with a counter-gift, “an evil in exchange for fire”. Hephaestus, the lame smith of the gods, takes earth and shapes it into the likeness of a modest girl. Athena belts her and dresses her in a shining white robe, draws an embroidered veil down from her head, “a wonder to see”, and wreathes her hair with fresh flowers. Then comes a golden crown that Hephaestus has worked with his own hands, chased with so many creatures of land and sea that they seem alive and about to speak.

Notice what the poet is describing. It is not a character but a finish: the material, the maker, the drapery, the metalwork. Hesiod’s phrase for the result is kalon kakon, “a beautiful evil”, and in the Theogony she never receives a personal name. She is simply the thing the gods produced, led out glorying in her ornaments, while wonder holds immortals and mortals alike.

Every god’s gift, line by line

The Works and Days retells the story as a fuller workshop order. Zeus, laughing, gives instructions one god at a time. Hephaestus is to mix earth with water, put in a human voice and strength, and give the figure a face like a goddess. Athena is to teach her crafts, above all weaving. Golden Aphrodite is to pour grace about her head, with aching desire and the cares that wear the limbs away. Hermes is to set in her “a dog’s mind and a thief’s ways”.

Then the order is carried out, and the list grows. Hephaestus moulds the figure. Athena belts and dresses it. The Graces and Lady Persuasion hang golden necklaces on her; the Seasons, with their lovely hair, crown her with spring flowers; Athena fits every ornament to her body. Hermes plants lies and coaxing words in her breast and gives her speech. Last of all comes the name, which Hesiod treats as part of the manufacture, like an inscription cut into a finished plinth.

And the herald of the gods called this woman Pandora, because all who have homes on Olympus had given her a gift, a sorrow for men who eat bread.

Hesiod, Works and Days (our rendering)

Read with a sculptor’s eye, every contribution is a layer. Earth and water are the clay; Hephaestus supplies the body and the voice; Athena the textiles and the skill of the hands; Aphrodite the surface allure; the Graces and the Seasons the applied ornament; Hermes the hidden workings. Hesiod’s Pandora is assembled the way a cult statue was: a core, then clothing, then jewellery, then a name.

A painter in fifth-century Athens seems to have seen it the same way. On a white-ground cup now in the British Museum, Athena and Hephaestus stand on either side of a stiff, frontal young woman, adding final touches as if she were still on the workbench. The painter labels her not Pandora but Anesidora, “she who sends up gifts”.

The relief beneath Athena’s feet

This is where Pheidias returns. The Athena Parthenos, dedicated in 438 BCE, was itself an assembled woman: ivory for the skin and plates of gold, removable if the city ever needed the metal, laid over a wooden core. Pliny the Elder, describing the statue in his Natural History, adds a detail Pausanias leaves out: twenty gods were shown attending Pandora’s birth. Neither writer explains why the scene was chosen, and modern scholars have offered several reasons, from Athena’s role as patron of craft to an Athenian taste for stories of first beginnings. We would only add that the match is hard to miss: a manufactured goddess standing on a picture of a manufactured woman.

The statue is lost; we know its appearance mainly from small Roman versions such as the Varvakeion statuette in Athens. The relief is lost too. What survives is the idea, which runs deep in Greek poetry. In the Iliad, Hephaestus is served by golden maidens who walk, speak and think. Pandora comes from the same workshop, only more lifelike and far more dangerous.

A jar, not a box

The object Pandora opens matters as much as the object she is. Hesiod says she lifted the great lid from the pithos and scattered what was inside, bringing grim troubles on humankind. A pithos is a storage jar, the kind Greek households set into the floor for grain, oil or wine; the storerooms of the palace at Knossos still hold rows of them, some nearly as tall as a person. The familiar “box” is a much later slip, usually traced to Erasmus in the early sixteenth century, who wrote pyxis, a small lidded case, where Hesiod had a great jar.

Hesiod never says where the jar came from. It simply stands in the house, and readers still argue whether it belonged to Epimetheus or travelled with the bride. Homer offers a related image: in the last book of the Iliad, Achilles tells Priam of two jars on the floor of Zeus’s palace, one of evils and one of blessings, from which the god deals out mixed fortunes to mortals.

Then comes the strangest line of all. Only Hope stayed behind, in an unbreakable home beneath the lip of the jar, because Pandora put the lid back first, as Zeus intended. Whether Hope is a comfort kept for us or one more evil kept from us, Hesiod does not say. A lovely surface with uncertain contents: that also describes Pandora herself.

Read this way, the myth is less about curiosity than about making. The gods built a beautiful object, loaded it with consequences and signed it with a name. Athena, who taught Pandora to work the loom, would later punish a mortal girl for weaving too well; the story of Arachne shows the other face of the same goddess. And the next time you stand before an ancient statue, in a museum or in our Sculpture Room, remember that the Greeks had already imagined the first woman as a figure finished on a bench, gift by gift.