Hesiod’s Pandora

     Other than lyrical poems of Sappho, no written works produced by Greek women are available. Therefore, whatever that is available on women in Greece have been written by men like Hesiod, thereby, second-hand information. The condition of the woman in the dominantly patriarchal Iron Age in which Homer and Hesiod lived shows a striking difference to that of the Mother-Goddess worshiping Minoan Age. Extreme forms of gender stratification had led to a great disparity between gender roles in Greece.

     The story of Pandora is not mentioned by Homer. It appears for the first time in Greek history in Theogony and Works and Days of Hesiod, a Boeotian poet who generally assumed to have composed towards the end of eighth century B.C. Some scholars allege that he had borrowed the story of the first woman from the Middle Eastern myths. According to one such Babylonian myth Ishthar, the goddess of love, fertility, and war falls in love with the hero Gilgamesh. When the hero rejects her advances she compels her father Anu, the King of gods to send the Bull of Heaven which kills men with its snort.

     Other scholars of Classics such as Graves and Harrison state that the Myth of Pandora is nothing but a concoction of the Boeotian tailored to suit his misogynistic agenda. In his book Greek Myths: I, Robert Graves says, “Yet, Hesiod’s account of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention, though based on the story of Demophon and Phyllis”(148).

     According to Jane Ellen Harrison in her book Mythology, Hesiod has altered the myth of Pandora. She points out several vase paintings that depict Pandora as the Earth-Mother rising from the earth while Zeus, Epimetheus and Hermese looked on. She also draws attention to another vase painting, a valid source of historical information, in which the first woman is called Anesidora – the sender up of gifts- “true epithet of Earth Mother” (51). The scholar in her 1963 book says that the cask opened by Pandora is actually a Minoan storage jar for wine, olive and grains. This view is supported by Robert Graves in Greek Myths: I when he asserts, “Pandora was the Earth-goddess Rhea, worshipped under that title at Athens and elsewhere…,whom the pessimistic Hesiod blames for man’s mortality and all the other ills which beset life, as well as for the frivolous and unseeingly behaviour of wives” (148-9).

     Whatever the think of the authenticity of Hesiod they do not underestimate the influence of epic poets on the Greek society from their time to the modern day. M. I. Finley in his book The World of Odysseus says, “In mythical imagination there is always implied an act of belief, without the belief in the reality of the object, myth would lose its ground” (22). Therefore, as stated in Women In All Ages In All Countries – Greek Women, the Boeotian poet “constitutes a bridge as regards social conditions between the Heroic Age and the early historical periods of the various peoples and cities of Greece… Hence we may expect to find in his poetry much light on the status of the women in the remote times” (Carroll 94).

     At the beginning the epics had limited circulation, given the geographical isolation of Greek states. With the ever increasing interaction between the Greek cities during the latter days, knowledge of epics spread, taking with them traditions, myths, and beliefs. Poets like Homer and Hesiod were held in reverence for being divinely inspired and their works were accepted as incontestable in the same light.

     Mitchell Carroll states that Hesiod’s view of women is inherently a product of the conditions around him. “And in seeking the cause of existing evils, the poet traces them back to the great evil which gods have inflicted upon men; and that is women” (94).

    Pandora the poet describes is a contradiction; she contains the qualities of an ideal Greek wife on one hand and on the other these qualities are tainted by others like greed and defiance which makes her deplorable. Hesiod presents the creation of Pandora in Theogony. “Wonder took hold of the deathless gods and mortal men when they saw that which was sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.” According to Hesiod Pandora brought nothing but trouble to men. “For from her is the race of women and female kind: of her the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their greatest trouble, no helpmate in hateful poverty, but only in wealth” (II 561-612). Hesiod compares women to drones who feed off sweat of the hardworking bees (men) in both of his works.

     The theme of misogyny continues with emphasis in The Works and Days. The story of the creation of Pandora is repeated in lines 52 to 89 with much more venom. The first woman is an “evil thing,/And all will love this ruin in their hearts” (60-61). It must be noted that it is Hermes who gives her “(s)ly manners and the morals of a bitch” and “(l)ies and persuasive words and cunning ways” (61). Pandora as a result is labelled as the ‘ruin of mankind’ (61). Her name, All-Gift, must be understood as a warning. These are the very qualities Odysseus, the hero of The Odyssey and Olympian Hermes are known for; and in them these qualities are not perceived as ruinous or deplorable.

     According to Hesiod, before Pandora men had an easy life. When the bride of Epimetheus opened the cask, she scattered “pains and evils among men” (62). Pandora closed the lid on hope. But Greeks in general do not seem to have a positive attitude to hope; Hesiod himself refers to it as ‘empty hope’ (75). The general epithet associated with hope is tuphlos- blind. After Pandora, men had to work hard for less. The reward they got in exchange for their drudgery was sexual gratification and progeny which made them dependent on women.

     To Hesiod order is an essential quality. Women represent an unknown and uncontrollable entity. They distract men with their sexuality and threaten men’s power with their ability to give birth. Hesiod’s perfect patriarch Zeus, on the other hand, had gained complete control over the goddesses by giving birth to Athene, and thereby making goddesses surplus. But mortal men are still under the influence of women in this capacity. Hesiod found it intolerable to be influenced by a creature he found beneath his kind. Therefore, the Daughters of Pandora are constantly likened to bitches that use their sexuality to lure men to their ruin. So he says;

“Don’t let a woman, wriggling her behind,

And fluttering and coaxing, take you in;

She wants your barn. Woman is just a cheat” (70).     

The picture projected by these lines is extremely uncomplimentary to women. The condition of the slave women was worse than that of the free women. She had to provide not only labour but also sexual gratification to her master. Women whenever possible were confined to the gynaecontis (the women’s quarters) where she engaged in ‘feminine’ tasks while men worked outside. Once again Hesiod compares women -by implication- to drones when he says the bitterly cold wind “does not pierce the soft-skinned girl who stays/ Indoors at home with mother…/…she bathes/Her tender skin, anoints herself with oil/And going to an inner room at home/She takes a nap upon a winter day”(75). While this is going on old men with round shoulders bend double like wheels in a desperate attempt to escape biting Boreas. This image is carried further as the poet describes the Greek summer- “Women are full of lust, but men are weak” (77). Mitchell Carroll in Women In All Ages In All Countries- Greek Women says, “It seems strange that Hesiod in describing farm duties should not tell us of the important functions of a housewife…So that even in the lines where he might well have commended her virtues the words of praise are left unsaid” (98).

     As stated in Theogony, men must marry, therefore, the poet advises to bring home a ‘wife’ when a man is thirty; the bride should be half his age. The role of the ‘husband’ is that of an instructor. Their relationship is never one of equal footing. “No prize is better than a worthy wife”, to the men of Hesiod’s world a woman is a commodity (81). Its prime function is to ensure the satisfaction of the ‘buyer’. Man must be ever cautious in his selection as a bad choice could make an already appalling situation worse.

“A bad one makes you shiver with cold

The greedy wife will roast her man alive” (81).      

M. I. Finley in The World of Odysseus states that Greeks of Hesiod’s age did not have words equivalent to ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. “A man was a man, a father, a warrior, a nobleman, a chieftain, a king, a hero; linguistically he was almost never a husband” (140). “Meaningful relationships and strong personal attachments were sought and found among men” (143). The reason for this was that women were deemed to be incapable and unworthy of such relationships. Only a “‘philia’ (friendship) of a lower kind between unequal partners as between a man and a woman” can exist (143). The end result is the disparity in the gender roles between men and women and the resulting misogyny in Greece. 

     Men in horticultural/pastoral societies like that of Hesiod’s deemed women to be surplus and allocated a secondary status to them. As a result women had to be ‘faithful’ to their husbands and as a reward they lost property rights. Virginity and sexual monogamy were expected of a woman. While men practiced monogamous marriages, they were not expected to be sexually monogamous as well. They kept concubines and slept with their slaves. Women were vessels for man’s seed. It is the conduct and the station of the man that reflect on the character of the child. When a man led a law abiding, just life “their wives (bore) sons/ Just like their fathers” (66). Women did not figure overmuch in the qualities of the sons she bore. These were the endemic views of the Iron Age Greece and misogynistic Hesiod had used the story of Pandora to give legitimacy to them.

     It must be noted that the vices Pandora said to have released are associated with desires of men. Therefore, it is their desires that drive men – not women- to their destruction, and they are the ones that set a cycle of destruction and evil in motion. Women, therefore, are just a convenient scapegoat for the inherent weaknesses in men.

     Whatever said and done, patriarchal Greek society is rooted in the works of Homer and Hesiod and has drawn from them its moral outlook and beliefs. It is said that epics were the only texts taught at schools in the post Homeric/Hesiodic Greece. Therefore, it is inevitable that misogyny inherent in them should be embraced by impressionable young men who learned them and passed on. The impact of works like Theogony and Works and Days could be observed in the latter literature, which in turn reflected the attitudes of their period. 

     Works of the following writers that appear in Mitchell Carroll’s Women In All Ages In All Countries can be cited as examples for the deep impact of the misogyny perpetrated by Hesiod:

·         The brilliant satirist Hipponax writing around 580 says, “Two happy days a woman brings a man: the first, when he marries her; the second, when he bears her to the grave” (103).

·         Semonides of Amorgos (c. 550 B.C.) writing on the types of women, “Zeus made these supreme evil…women: even though she seem to be a blessing, when a man has wedded one she becomes a plague” (101).

·         Susarion (c. 440 B.C.), the father of comedy, “Women are evil; and yet, my countrymen, one cannot set up house without evil; for to be married or not to be married is alike bad” (258).

·         The great orator Demosthenes (c. 380 B.C.) – “We take hetaira for our pleasure, a concubine for our dialy attention to our physical wants, a wife to give s legitimate children and a respectable house” (210).

·         Philemon the poet (c. 350 B.C.) says, “A good wife’s duty ‘tis, Nicostratus, not to command, but to obey her spouse; most mischievous a wife who rules her husband” (259).

·         Antipanes the poet (c. 300 B.C.)

“What! When you court concealment, will you tell,

The matter to women? Just as well,

Tell the criers in the public squares,

 ‘Tis hard to say which of them louder blares.” (258).

·         Menander, the greatest representative of the new comedy says:

“When thou fair woman seest, marvel not;

Great beauty’s oft to countless faults allied” (259). 

Even Thucydides (c. 395 B.C.), the historian has not escaped the corruptive influence of misogyny and resulting discrimination levelled at women. In writing Pericles’s Funeral Oration he says, “The best wife is the one of whom the least is said, either good or evil” (Mathews 76-8)

It must be noted that the misogyny of the Greeks was not uniform. According to Mitchell Carroll, a Spartan matron had a lot of say in the affairs of her family and society. The Writer quotes a conversation between a Spartan queen and an outsider:

“‘You Spartan women are the only ones who rule over men,’ said a stranger to Gorgo, wife of Leonidas. ‘True,’ she rejoined; ‘for we are the only ones who are the mothers of men.’” (143).

Of course, the Spartan women too drew their identity from their role as ‘mothers of men’.

     Plato in The Republics advocates equality between sexes achieved through equality in education. This very progressive idea was promptly rejected by Plato’s own pupil Aristotle. R. T. Matthews and F. Dewitt Platt in Western Humanities state that Aristotle advocated the Iron Age philosophy of a rigid patriarchy– “Each one gives law to his children and to his wives” (95).

     In conclusion as Sarah Pomeroy in Goddess, Whores, Wives, and Slaves says, “The myth of the past modelled the attitudes of successive more sophisticated generations and perceived the continuity of the social order…His (Hesiod’s) views of gods and humankind not only shaped, but probably corresponded to the ideas held by the population as a whole” (1).           

Works Cited

Carroll, Mitchell, Women In All Ages In All Countries – Greek Women. Philadelphia: Rittenhouse, 1908.

Finley, M. I. The World of Odysseus. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.

Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths: I. London: Penguin, 1960.

Halsall, P. The Myth of Pandora. March 1999 <http://www.book-of-thoth.com/article_submit/history/ancient_history/the-myth-of-pandora.html>  

Harison, Jane Ellen, Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1963.

Hesiod. Theogony. Trans. Dorothea Wenders. London: Penguin, 1973.  

Hesiod. Works and Days. Trans. Dorothea Wenders. London: Penguin, 1973.

Kirk, G.S. The Nature of Greek Myths. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1974.

Mason, K.M. “Ancient Athenian Women: A look at their lives”. <http:/www.moyak.com/papers/athenian-women.html>  

Matthew, R. T. and F. Dewitt Platt. Western Humanities. New York: McGraw Hill, 2001. 

Pomeroy, S. B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves. New York: Schocken Books, 1975.

“The Wiles of Women.” <http://www.zenzoa.com/articles/2005/10/07/the-wiles-of-women/>