May 23, 2014

“Hope” in Pandora’s Jar (2)

Category: History,Literature :: Permalink

A couple of weeks ago, I summarized Jean-Pierre Vernant’s thoughts on the “hope” (elpis: anticipation, expectation) left in Pandora’s jar when all the evils flew out.  While some have presented the safekeeping of elpis in the jar as if it means that, in spite of all the evils in the world, man still has hope, Vernant sees the elpis as something closely associated with the emergence of the evils, something ambiguous.  As he explains in his essay “The Myth of Prometheus in Hesiod” (in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece):

If in the Golden Age, human life held nothing but good things, if all the evils were still far away, shut up inside the jar (Works, 115-16), there would be no grounds to hope for anything different from what one has.  If life was delivered up entirely and irremediably to evil and misfortune (Works, 200-1), there would be no place even for Elpis.  But since the evils are henceforth inextricably intermingled with the good things (Theog., 603-10; Works, 178, to be compared with Works, 102) and it is impossible for us to foresee exactly how tomorrow will turn out for us, we are always hoping for the best.  If men possessed the infallible foreknowledge of Zeus, they would have no use for Elpis.  And if their lives were confined to the present with no knowledge or concern at all regarding the future, they would equally know nothing of Elpis.  However, caught between the lucid forethought of Prometheus and the thoughtless blindness of Epimetheus, oscillating between the two without ever being able to separate them, they know in advance that suffering, sickness, and death is bound to be their lot, and, being ignorant of the form their misfortune will take, they only recognize it too late when it has already struck them.

Whoever is immortal, as the gods are, has no need of Elpis.  Nor is there any Elpis for those who, like the beasts, are ignorant of their mortality.  If man who is mortal like the beasts could foresee the whole future as the gods can, if he was altogether like Prometheus, he would no longer have the strength to go on living, for he could not bear to contemplate his own death directly.  But, knowing himself to be mortal, though ignorant of when and how he will die, hope, which is a kind of foresight, although a blind one (Aeschylus, Prometheus, 250; cf. also Plato, Gorgias, 523d ae), and blessed illusion, both a good and a bad thing at one and the same time–hope alone makes it possible for him to live out this ambiguous, two-sided life.  Henceforward, there is a reverse aspect to everything: Contact can only be made with the gods through sacrifice, which at the same time consecrates the impassable barrier between mortals and immortals; there can be no happiness without unhappiness, no birth without death, no abundance without toil, no Prometheus without Epimetheus–in a word, no Man without Pandora (200-201).

That’s Vernant’s view.  Elpis is not a purely good thing; it is ambiguous, both the anticipation of good and the certain knowledge that–somehow, sometime–evil will come.

But what surprises me is that Vernant, at least in what I’ve read, doesn’t seem to see the elpis in Pandora’s jar in connection with the other parallels he so carefully works out in Hesiod’s accounts of Prometheus’s rivalry with Zeus:

* Prometheus tricks Zeus into accepting the worse part of the sacrifices and letting man have the best.  He does so by taking the bones of the sacrifice and covering them up with lovely white fat.  When Zeus sees them, he thinks they’re going to be especially delicious and so he chooses them as his portion, leaving man with the good meat, the better part, as his portion of the sacrifices.

* Zeus responds by refusing to let man have fire and by hiding man’s life (bios, here a reference to grain) in the ground so that now man has to work hard to get it.  Bones hidden in fat correspond to bios hidden in the ground.

* Prometheus steals fire from Zeus and gives it to man.

* Zeus responds by making a “beautiful evil” (kalon kakon) for man that corresponds in some way to fire, namely, woman.  In the Theogony, the woman isn’t named but is described as being the equivalent of drones who eat the honey the worker bees produce.  A woman has a beautiful face and figure, but it hides a hungry stomach that gobbles up all a man’s earnings.  In Works, Hesiod describes the woman, now called Pandora, as a beautiful woman who has a jar which, when opened, disperses evils among men.  Once again, however, there is a correspondence: bones hidden in fat to look attractive to Zeus correspond, not only to grain hidden in the ground, but also now to an evil heart and a hungry stomach hidden inside a beautiful face and figure.

But right here I expected Vernant to say something about elpis.  He notes that in the Theogony, “men are presented with a choice: either not to marry, and to enjoy a sufficiency of grain (since the female gaster [belly] does not take it from them) but not to have any children (since a female gaster is necessary to give birth) — the evil thus counterbalancing the good; or to marry and, even with a good wife, the evil again counterbalances the good” (Myth and Society 187).  Elsewhere, Vernant puts it this way:

This is the dilemma now: If a man marries, his life will pretty certainly be hell, unless he happens on a very good wife, which is extremely rare.  Conjugal life is thus an inferno–misery after misery.  On the other hand, if a man does not marry, his life could be a happy one: He would have his fill of everything, he would never lack for anything–but at this death, who will get his accumulated wealth?  It will be scattered, into the hands of relatives for whom he has no particular affection.  If he marries it is a catastrophe, and if he doesn’t, it’s another kind of catastrophe.

Woman is two different things at once: She is the paunch, the belly devouring everything her husband has laboriously gathered at the cost of his effort, his toil, his fatigue; but that belly is also the only one that can produce the thing that extends a man’s life–a child (The Universe, the Gods, and Men 61-62).

Now we can put it together: It is only in Works that Hesiod tells us about Pandora’s jar; in Theogony, the “beautiful evil” is the woman herself.  In fact, we could put it this way: woman herself is Pandora’s jar, a nice-looking vessel full of all kinds of evils.  She is Zeus’s victory in his rivalry with Prometheus.  She is the source of all evils in a man’s life, and in Works, she is the gift Prometheus warned Epimetheus not to accept from Zeus.

And yet, though the evils rush out from her, still elpis (hope, expectation, anticipation of the future) resides inside her.  From the woman evils come into man’s life, but in the woman is the only hope the man has for the future, the hope of an heir–assuming that her all-devouring belly is also a fruitful belly and that the fruit it bears is a male child who lives and grows up to inherit a man’s property.  And so the ambiguity of elpis that Vernant points out is maintained: a man gets married in the hope of an heir, and yet that hope is blind and uncertain (will she be fruitful? will she have a male heir?), so that elpis is both good and bad.

Posted by John Barach @ 2:12 pm | Discuss (0)

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