PROMETHEUS highlighted
updated:
Saturday, October 17, 2026 08:25AM
Wednesday, October 07, 2026, 6:18 PM
from Pandora entry: Pandora
Historic interpretations
- of the Pandora figure are
- rich enough
- to have offered Dora and Erwin Panofsky
- scope for monographic treatment.[25]
- M. L. West writes that
- the story of Pandora and
- her jar
- is from a pre-Hesiodic myth, and
- that this explains the confusion and
- problems with
- Hesiod's version and
- its inconclusiveness.[26]
- He writes that in earlier myths,
- Pandora was married to Prometheus, and
- cites the ancient Hesiodic
- Catalogue of Women
- as preserving this older tradition, and
- that the jar may have at one point
- contained only good things for humanity.
- He also writes that it may have been that
- Epimetheus and Pandora and
- their roles were transposed
- in the pre-Hesiodic myths,
- a "mythic inversion".
- He remarks that
- there is a curious correlation between
- Pandora being made out of earth
- in Hesiod's story,
- to what is in the Bibliotheca
- that Prometheus
- created man from water and earth.[26][27]
- Hesiod's myth of Pandora's jar,
- then, could be an amalgam
- of many variant early myths.
For she (Pandora) brings with her a jar
- (which, due to textual corruption
- in the sixteenth century,
- came to be called a box)[10][11][12] (WAS IT A SQUARE OR A CUBE? rk)
- containing "countless plagues" (100).
- Prometheus had
- (fearing further reprisals)
- warned his brother Epimetheus
- not to accept any gifts from Zeus.
- But Epimetheus did not listen;
- he accepted Pandora,
- who promptly scattered the contents of her jar.
- As a result, Hesiod tells us,
- the earth and sea are "full of evils" (101).
- One item, however, did not escape the jar (96–9):
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.
rk NOTE: I suspect the "jar" is
a metaphor for the HUMAN HEART!
updated:
Saturday, October 17, 2026 08:24AM
Wednesday, October 14, 2026 07:11AM
Saturday, October 03, 2026, 1:19 PM