“Hope” in Pandora’s Jar (2)

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.

“Hope” in Pandora’s Jar

In the Greek myth of Pandora, she opens the jar  and all the evils that were in it rush out into the world. By the time she gets the stopper back in, only one thing is left inside: elpis, which is often translated “hope.”  And so, as the story is sometimes told, even though there are all kinds of evils and hardships in the world, we still always have hope. It’s kind of a positive ending to a sad story.

Or is it?

After all, what was this jar full of? Evils. Not evils and one good thing (hope). It was full of evils, full down to that last drop, elpis.

But how could hope be an evil?

In his essay “At Man’s Table,” Jean-Pierre Vernant takes a stab at an explanation. In Hesiod’s view, man has undergone a change from the way things used to be. Where men used to eat in fellowship with the gods, now there is sacrifice which not only provides some communion with the gods but also emphasizes the distance between them. Where food used to be free for the taking and the least effort could get you a year’s supply, now Zeus has hidden bios (life = grain) in the ground and you have to sweat to get it. Where there once were only men, now there are women (“beautiful evils,” as Hesiod describes them), who are like drones and dogs, gobbling up all that men produce and bring home. And where once everything was the same, day after day, now there is change.

And with change comes elpis: not hope (which for us is always positive) but, more broadly, expectation or anticipation.  A man labors to plant his field and he cherishes the expectation (hope) of a good harvest.  He labors during harvest in the expectation (hope) that he will have enough grain saved up that he and his family will be able to eat all winter and have enough to plant in the spring.  His life is full of that sort of elpis, but he has that elpis only because he also knows that misfortune is coming.  It’s not just that trouble might come: bad weather might destroy his crops; a fire might destroy his barn and all the grain he saved.  Rather, it’s that he knows trouble is coming.  Pandora let those evils out into the world and they’re roaming around, alighting on one person after another. You never know what’s coming.  You never know when it’s going to be your turn.  But you know one thing for certain: While things might go well for you for a while, trouble is coming.  That’s elpis, and unlike those other evils that roam the world, striking here and there, elpis stays in the jar at home, because it’s something you have every day, all day long.  It’s your constant but blind expectation: While you’re always hoping for good, evil will come and you never know when or how.

“Beautiful Evils”?

What did the ancient Greeks think about women?

Jean-Pierre Vernant, in a brilliant essay on Hesiod’s Theogony, explains.  According to Hesiod, Zeus created the first woman to be a “beautiful evil” (kalon kakon) to afflict men.  She would be a trap from which men could not escape.   Though she appears beautiful on the outside, on the inside she has “the spirit of a bitch and the temperament of a thief” (kuneon te noon kai epiklopon ethos).  You might be able to find a good wife, Hesiod admits, but even so, in and through her, “evil will come to balance out the good” (kakon esthloi antipherizei).

Women, according to Hesiod, are like drones: the men do all the work, and women sit at home and feed on the honey.  Women are like flaming fire, burning and consuming but never satisfied.  Women are stomachs, disguised by outward beauty, gulping down the food the man works so hard to provide.  Women are like dogs, gobbling up the scraps.

That’s not just Hesiod.  Vernant compares two passages in Homer’s Odyssey: “Is there anything more like a dog than the odious belly?” asks Odysseus, when he’s hungry.  Elsewhere, Agamemnon says the same thing, but changes one word: “Is there anything more like a dog than a woman?”

Nevertheless, for the ancient Greeks, men are now stuck having to get married to women.  On the one hand, they consume everything you’ve earned.  On the other, you need them in order to have a (male) heir.  They’re a trap, but one you can’t do without.

It is no wonder, then, that this first woman — whose name Hesiod gives in his Works and Days as Pandora — is the one who opens the jar that contains all the evils in the world and releases them on mankind (on males, that is).

What a difference there is when you turn from the ancient Greeks to the Bible, where the woman, far from being a “beautiful evil” is called “glory,” where the blame for the sin that brought death and misery into the world is attributed to Adam, even though Eve ate the forbidden fruit first, and where men are called, as co-heirs with them of glory, to show honor to their wives.