Letters on Pragmatic Hope: Pandora and the Birth of Hope

The people who brought you Greek tragedy had a story about hope, possibly one of the oldest in the world: the tale of Pandora’s box. Even people who don’t know the story’s origin know what it means: to take an action that seems harmless, even helpful, but that leads to unforeseen, dangerous consequences that can’t be controlled. You’ve probably heard AI described as a Pandora’s box. It’s not a cheerful story, despite what you may have heard.

Many of us learned a suitable-for-children version. There are variations, but basically, it went like this: Zeus, king of the gods, created a beautiful woman named Pandora (her name meant ‘all gifts’) and gave her to the earth-dwelling god Epimetheus. Epimetheus’s brother was Prometheus; their names meant ‘Hindsight’ and ‘Foresight,’ and each fulfilled those names: one was foolish, the other was clever. Prometheus brought fire to humankind from heaven. 

Prometheus told Epimetheus never to open a gift from the gods, but that fool forgot to tell his bride. She opened the box, and all the evils that destroy human happiness were set free. But hope stayed in the box. 

Yay! The End.

I remember learning it in school as a fable with a moral: don’t do what you’ve been told not to do, or you’ll ruin everything. The unsubtle message here, as in Hesiod’s original, is this: disobedient women ruin everything. (See ‘Eve, apple.’) 

Hesiod (HE-see-od) is said to have composed his dark and complicated epic poem in the 7th century BCE, when the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” were surfacing. Unless you’ve taken courses in Classical Studies (hint), you’ve probably never heard of Hesiod, but he was important in his day. (The 5th century Greek historian Herodotus said that Hesiod and Homer gave the Greeks their gods. He was that important.) 

We have his epics in full: “Theogony,” about the beginning of the world, the birth of the gods, the civil war between sky gods and earth gods, the triumph of Zeus, Prometheus’s theft of fire, and Pandora. “Works and Days” focuses more on humankind, their flaws and imperfect justice, and their precarious existence in an agricultural society, when survival depends on doing the right thing at the right time and hoping for good weather. Along with tips for farming, “Works and Days,” like Theogony, tells the story of Prometheus the fire-bringer and Pandora. But the introduction of hope into the world of mortals, via Pandora, appears only in “Works and Days.” The Greek word for hope, by the way, is elpis (EL-pis). 

Prometheus, less powerful than Zeus, was a trickster god. Zeus wanted to withhold fire from mortals; who knows why. So Prometheus thought it would be fun to steal fire from Zeus and give it to mortals, which he did. 

Things then ceased to be fun. Zeus set an eternal torture for Prometheus, and promised to make humans pay, too.

“As fire’s price I’ll give an evil thing, which all
shall cherish in their hearts, embracing their own scourge.”

And what was that evil thing? The first woman. 

Under Zeus’s direction, the forger god Hephaestus made a kind of automaton out of mud, spiffing her up to be as beautiful as a goddess. Athena trained her in the feminine household arts, and Aphrodite made her sexy. Other divinities dressed her up and added jewelry and a crown of flowers. So far, not so bad, but then, by Zeus’s order: 

The Argos-slaying guide [Hermes] implanted in her breast
deceits and wheedling words, the habits of a thief,
according to loud-thundering Zeus’s plans. And speech
the herald of the gods put in, and named the maid
Pandora, since all those who hold Olympian homes
had given gifts to her, sorrows for hard-working men.

Pandora didn’t just set disaster in motion. She was the disaster, and, in Hesiod’s words, a trap that could not be escaped.

Zeus ordered Hermes to take Pandora to Epimetheus, as a present. Epimetheus, the fool, forgot that his brother Prometheus (now chained to a rock and having his liver eaten by Zeus’s eagle) had warned him not to accept gifts from Zeus. Too late, there she was. She was bad enough, thanks to all the wickedness inserted in her heart. What came next was one of Zeus’s signature flourishes. 

Pandora did not bring a box with her. She brought a pithos, an everyday object made of clay, heavy, around four feet tall, used in ancient times to store oil, grain, and other necessaries. It might have been part of her dowry. Inevitably, she lifts the heavy lid.

Before Pandora arrived, men – strangely, all of them men – had no needy, alluring, lying women, and better yet, they did no hard work, caught no diseases, suffered no hardship of any kind. But when Pandora opened the jar, she released “grievous cares for men.” They all fled into the world, except for Elpis, Hope.

Alone there, Elpis, in her indestructible home,
remained within, beneath the lip [of the jar], nor by the door
escaped, because the vessel’s lid had stopped her first,
by will of aegis-bearing, cloud-compelling Zeus.
Among the people wander countless miseries;
the earth is full of evils, and the sea is full;
diseases come by day to people, and by night,
spontaneous, rushing, bringing mortals evil things
in silence, since contriving Zeus removed their voice.
And thus from Zeus’s mind there can be no escape.

Not the children’s version. 

Elpis was an evil, just like the rest of the jar’s contents: Once you had hope, hope had you. Hope allows you to think that you will escape or overcome the evils that beset humans: loss, pain, disease, death, and natural or man-made disaster. In a time when people routinely died in childbirth, or from an infected wound, by drowning at sea, being killed or enslaved by invaders, well, hope was not realistic, and it sure would not protect you. The world was (and still is) more dangerous and uncertain if hope is your only hope. 

Even so, people still entertained hope. How could they not? Zeus sent them Hope, and there is no defying Zeus. In 416 BC (300 years after Hesiod), the Athenians were 15 years into a war they incited with their grabby imperialism, a war that they would ultimately lose. Thucydides, in his “History of the Peloponnesian War,” gives us a contemporary view of hope in what’s known at the Melian dialogue. (He may have made it up; that’s another story.)

The Athenians sailed to the island of Melos. The Melians were told that they could surrender or be destroyed, but they were not allowed to stay neutral. The Melians refused. “To submit is to give ourselves over to despair; action preserves for us a hope that we may stay standing.” They thought that the Spartans would come and save them.

The Athenians were not impressed. “Hope,” they said, “is danger’s comforter,” “a luxury” and “a pleasure-giving trap” (sound familiar?). Further, they tell the Melians, don’t be like silly people who rely on prophecies and oracles, “that delude men with hopes.” (So much for the gods.) There’s much more, including the infamous, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.”

Anyway, the Melians refuse to surrender, so the Athenians kill all the men and enslave the women and children. That was a standard military operation, from the “Iliad” on, but it’s clear that Thucydides does not want the reader to admire what they did to the harmless Melians.

Hope, in the ruthless Athenian view, is not pragmatic, but pragmatism is a response to the unreliability of hope. The word ‘pragmatic’ itself descends without much change in meaning from the ancient Greek work for doing or taking action. (‘Practical’ and ‘practice’ are from the same root.) The people of Athens, the cultural center of the Greek world, were thoroughly pragmatic. They were responsible for major advances in mathematics, astronomy, engineering, architecture, and art, and they originated the genre of history (Herodotus!) and theater as we know it in the Western world. Oh, and democracy. 

Radical democracy (i.e., not representative, like ours), was a result of the Athenians’ pragmatic approach to solving inequity in the 6th century BCE. Democracy (the rule of the ‘demos,’ the people) weakened the power of aristocratic clans without destroying or disenfranchising them. That solution, imperfect as it was – women, the enslaved, and non-citizens could not vote – has stood the test of time. American democracy is in genuine danger now because of the inordinate power of the inordinately wealthy, religious zealots who want to forbid women from voting and end the separation of church and state, politicians who are suppressing the vote in a variety of ways, and members of the Supreme Court who are mostly okay with a lot of this. We’ve seen that hope alone is no defense. It’s shockingly easy to weaken democracy by poisoning its roots: elections.

It is hard to feel hopeful. Our modern view of hope as a combination of courage, faith, and positive thinking is not elpis. But hope that accepts the possibility of disappointment and loss may be the most pragmatic of all. 

I love Homer’s “Iliad” and all of Greek tragedy because none of it asks us to look away from the pain of being human. Those works weren’t written for people to sit in rooms by themselves and read. They were presented as performances, public events. They allowed people to be shocked and sad together, and experience the most unifying art of all, singing and dancing in unison. 

I wish we had a unifying protest anthem for our shocking and saddening times. Vietnam era protest music doesn’t cut it anymore; for starters, there’s no draft. Other than writing a pragmatic hope anthem – please do it! – what to do?

Here’s my two cents. I know you’ve heard this before AND I CAN HEAR YOU ROLLING YOUR EYES but I stand by it: put your phone away and talk to people. Take your earbuds out and listen to people, or your breath, or the birds, whatever. Make eye contact, say hello and thank you to the people who make your food and clean up around you. Look up at the sky, just for a minute or two. 

Paying radical, compassionate, deep attention to the world is, I think, a good way to see your place here and what might be possible. If pragmatic hope means being realistic and optimistic, try paying attention – listening, talking, voicing appreciation when it’s due, speaking up. It’s all doable, it’s encouraging, strengthening, and you learn stuff. Learning is always pragmatic.

For a full translation of the Pandora story in Works and Days, see Bruce McClennan’s translation (such a good one that I borrowed it here), on the Diotima website, an excellent resource for information on women, gender, sex, sexualities, race, ethnicity, class, status, masculinity, enslavement, disability, and the intersections among them in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Elizabeth Bobrick is a Visiting Scholar in the Dept. of Classical Studies. She writes about Greek tragedy and what it has to say to us now on Substack at “This Won’t End Well: On Loving Greek Tragedy” (https://elizabethbobrick.substack.com). You can find more of her public-facing scholarship on salon.com, theconversation.com, and at elizabethbobrick.com.