The Ancients - Pandora

Episode Date: May 8, 2022

According to Greek myth, Pandora was the first human woman - moulded from the earth by Hephaestus on the instruction of Zeus himself.We've all heard of Pandora's box, but in actual fact it was no such thing. Instead it was a jar containing all the evils of humanity, but even these contents of the jar are up for debate! So what is real story behind this often misunderstood, misinterpreted and maligned figure?In this episode Tristan is joined by esteemed author, broadcaster, classicist and comedian Natalie Haynes to discover the truth about the first woman of Ancient Greek mythology.Natalie's book Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths is available on Amazon here.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we're talking again about Greek mythology, about a woman from Greek mythology. We're talking all about Pandora, the first human woman according to the Greek myths. But what do these stories tell us about Pandora? What's this whole story behind the box? And why should we not think that there was a box, but instead that there was a jar? Well, to explain all, I was

delighted to get back on the podcast to the esteemed author, classicist, comedian, broadcaster, Natalie Haynes. Natalie was on the podcast a few months back to talk all about Helen of Troy, and here she is again to explain all about Pandora and the story of Pandora's jar. So without further ado, to explain all about Pandora, here's Natalie. Natalie, great to have you on the podcast. It's my pleasure. Now, Pandora. We've all heard Pandora. We've all heard of Pandora's box. I'm vexed by this, but yeah. Exactly. But the story is actually a bit more

complicated than that isn't it it is i'm afraid so pandora doesn't get a box until erasmus so 2000 years after the earliest versions of her story to survive to us which are in hesiod in both he writes about her twice in the theogony and the works and days and in the shorter version in the theogony probably the version, he doesn't make any mention of her having any kind of receptacle at all. He just describes her being created, which is by far and away the most important thing about her to the ancients. In every single visual representation of Pandora to survive to us today, she is shown in the act of being created rather than holding any kind of receptacle. The important thing for the ancients is that she is the first woman before Pandora,

no women, after Pandora, women. And that is her role. Men, you're descended from Erichthonius. Women, we're descended from Pandora. They're both chthonic. They're both made out of clay. And so we are literally, according to the Greek origin story, we're different races. We descend from these different characters.

But that is her crucial role. And then in the longer version that Hesiod tells us in the works and days, in that she appears, she's created on Olympus by Hephaestus at the behest of Zeus. She's sort of decorated and added to by other gods and goddesses. Hermes, I think, gives her a voice. Athene teaches her to weave the graces and the charities come and help her out, decorate her dress and things like that. And then she's taken by Hermes to the house of a man named Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, as his wife. And when she arrives there, she suddenly has the

jar. There's been no mention of it before that point. So we have to assume that the jar has come from Olympus, that it's come from Zeus. And yet it's never attributed to Zeus you know it's clearly been delivered as she has by Hermes he never gets mentioned either and suddenly there she is in the house of Epimetheus with a jar and in some versions of her story for example Hesiod's she opens the jar and it's full of terrible things in other versions of the story the version told by Theognis in his elegies the jar is full of nice things that she lets out into the world in other versions of the story the version told by theognis and his elegies the jar is full of nice things that she lets out into the world in other versions of the story for example one version told by aesop of fables fame it's epimetheus who opens the freaking jar and yet somehow it's always pandora's fault and it's always a box and she always does it deliberately and it's always full

of terrible things all of which are let out into the world. And therefore, everything is ruined. And it's like, wow, we are determined to make a pretty woman responsible for everything that's gone wrong. And of course, what happens is that her story gets sort of mapped onto the Eve narrative, which is a much more kind of clear cut case of somebody doing something they've been told not to, even though, you know, I think Eve could do with a bit of defending, truthfully. But, you know, she does eat the thing that she's been told not to, even though, you know, I think Eve could do with a bit of defending, truthfully. But, you know, she does eat the thing that she's been told not to eat. And so this idea that a woman is responsible for everything going wrong is so heavily stitched into Christianity in particular.

But obviously it's in what Professor Stavrokopoulou would call the Hebrew Bible. So what Christians might call the Old Testament. So it's right there from the beginning in the book of Genesis, you know, a beautiful woman is responsible for everything being wrong. And that's what happens to Pandora, you know, instead of being the first woman who is, you know, responsible for there being women, which I might add Hesiod is thoroughly against, you know, the carefree age of men was at an end. He says, well, dude, you've now got fire and women. So good good news you've got hot dinner and someone to talk to over it so i'm sure your carefree life is at an end but on the other hand

at least you've got something interesting to say and more than just true to take i can't imagine he's here to create a table you see my point and then erasmus comes along who isn't even a christian he's a humanist and yet he is responsible for this incredible slur on Pandora's character, which makes her seem more like Eve than ever. He makes a mistake. He takes the word pythos, which means jar in Greek, and he translates it to the word pyxis, which means box in Latin. And it takes such a short space of time, literally just a few decades after he does this, you start seeing every single image of Pandora is now with a box. you start seeing every single image of Pandora is now with a box. Every single one. It takes almost no time, it feels like, for it to go from being like a regular box to a strong box.

So she's really having to make the effort to open it up. It's like there's a lot of malevolence in this woman. And you think, well, look at the jars in any museum. And especially if you go somewhere like Greece or Italy or italy or sicily to see them where you get earthquakes they're wired to the freaking wall because they're so fragile you know they're really narrow at the base they're really fat at the top you can see the cracks on them don't put the world's evils in there it'll definitely break whereas a box it's like a lovely safe box that you can keep things in and that you can't just knock over you know and if you did knock it over it's square it might stay shut anyway and as i say, it becomes a strongbox. It's strapped shut with

leather straps. Pandora goes from being essentially unlucky or curious to being villainous. It's just a mistake. I should say that he has form. Erasmus has form for these sorts of mistranslations. By any means, it's not usually a gendered issue. So for example, if we were describing somebody in contemporary English as being very blunt, we might say he or she likes to call a spade a spade. And that comes from Erasmus, except for the fact that the word scapher doesn't mean spade. It means a hollowed out object like a canoe. So in fact, we should all say, ah, she likes to call a canoe a canoe, but we don't do that. And it's all because Erasmus spoiled it for everyone. So Erasmus has got form on this, canoe so in fact we should all say ah she likes to call a canoe a canoe but we don't do that and it's all because erasmus spoiled it for everyone so erasmus has got form on this basically he's got

form on this yeah so much for being a polymath erasmus but yeah obviously a very brilliant man and everybody's allowed to make a mistake but in the instance of pandora it just has incredible ramifications that have lasted ever since absolutely as we will delve into let's unpack all of this now then natalie i mean if we go back to then hesiod and theogonis and uh aesop there but it sounds like so these ancient greek stories myths of pandora she's a gift from the gods almost or she's part of a plan by the gods she's very much part of a plan by the gods absolutely so zeus is tricked on two counts by prometheus prometheus a titan, steals fire, which the gods don't want men to have yet, or at least Zeus doesn't want men,

and I use the word men advisedly because women don't exist yet, to have yet. And he also tricks Zeus in the mode of sacrifice that he gets. It's always seemed a bit strange, I think, that when the Greeks sacrificed to the gods gods they sacrificed the sort of inedible bits bones fat like awful i'm vegetarian so all of this sounds repulsive to me but there we go and then people get to eat like the nice bit which is i have no idea actually like muscle i suppose and it would sort of make more sense if the gods got the nice bit and mortals only ate the horrible bit and so obviously looking for an explanation for this the greeks come up with the story of prometheus who gets a sacrificial animal and separates it into two bits the sort of inedible pile and the nice pile and then he puts a piece of

glistening fat according to hesiod which if anything makes it sound less appetizing to me but there you are um on top of the bad pile and i don't know something that looks even less appetizing than glistening fat on top of the good pile and zeus is very cross and says that's not fair and prometheus says well you can choose which which portion you'd prefer and you know zeus glances quickly and is greedy and so he chooses the glistening fat which turns out to be on top of the bones and the offal and that's why the gods get that that bit of an animal and men get get the other bit and zeus is so peeved by this trick and by the theft of fire that he creates a two-pronged response i mean prometheus gets like a one-pronged response i suppose because he gets tied to a rock

and his liver is pecked out by an eagle every day forever i suppose if you consider a beak to be a prong just the one prong. But the revenge on people is twofold, perhaps. So it's the creation of Pandora, who is described by Hesiod as Aunt Agathoyo in exchange for the good thing. And really tempting for people to read that as therefore she is bad. But I'm sort of troubled by that as a mindset, because fire isn't intrinsically good or bad, is it? Depends whether you're freezing cold or live in the path of a forest fire. It's both good and bad depending on context. Fire itself is amoral. And so I tend to conclude that Pandora is also amoral, that she is a morally

neutral agent, I suppose. The time when men could live carefree without fire or work or any of those things is coming to an end one way or another. And once fire is handed over, then things have to be different. So the plan of Zeus is, okay, then women, okay, then children. And it is the case, you know, that people undergo an enormous shift in what they can do once fire is discovered. It's a good origin story to explain that. It's a good piece of myth-making. But I think people have found it very tempting over the years to sort of suggest that Pandora is a villain. Fire is unambiguously good and Pandora is unambiguously bad. But I think it's really hard, especially when you see, you know, the horrific forest fires that afflicted Greece last year. I'm not sure that makes sense in

the context of of Greece you know in a cold damp country like Britain we're like yeah mmm toasty fire central heating thanks very much but it doesn't feel that way necessarily I think when you're when you're thinking about this story in its physical context absolutely not and especially you mentioned Greece there especially as we focus in on Athens in a moment and her depiction there but one other thing quickly before we move on the whole name Pandora what does it actually mean yeah really good question because routinely people will tell you it means the girl with all the gifts which was indeed the title of a rather good zombie novel a few years ago but it doesn't quite that That would be Pandosa,

because that's passive. And Pandora actually means all giving, not to whom all is given. And Hesiod says, they called her Pandora because every god gave her a gift. But it is undeniably the case that the word is active and not passive. So she is all giving rather than just all given, although she is undeniably the latter i don't know it's always seemed rather sad to me that we sort of rob her of her generosity of her agency so i tend to think that seems to me quite a strong argument in favor of seeing her as morally neutral she gives everything good things bad things and it makes her a bit more complicated than just this sort of again pretty destructive lady it's like oh give me a break

i'll give you on this these good things bad things if we focus in on the jar a bit more of these original origin stories the one other thing which caught my eye when reading about it was this thing that doesn't leave the jar right right at the bottom yeah so what is all this it's confusing i think yeah it is actually i think that's absolutely. So the one kind of constant in Pandora's story when it's told by writers, as I say, when she's depicted by ancient visual artists, she's never shown with a jar or any other thing. But when writers write about it and they give her a jar,

sometimes the jar has good things, sometimes the jar has bad things, sometimes she opens it, sometimes her husband opens it, sometimes it's by mistake, sometimes it's deliberate. But the one thing which is consistent across all these versions is that a single object is retained in the jar.

And that object or personification sometimes is elpis. It's hope or expectation. People usually translate it as hope, but the Greek elpis doesn't mean anything quite as positive as hope. You're not necessarily expecting a good thing to happen. You're just expecting a thing to happen. Expectation. Right expectation right i mean in greek and i think it's true in latin actually when somebody says what's new they mean what new bad thing has happened which of course doesn't ever come into anyone's mind when they're watching the news today

but yeah elpis hope or expectation is always retained in the jar and even that has been used as a stick to beat Pandora, because of course you can see that as a positive or negative thing, irrespective of whether the jar had good or bad things in it. So if the jar is full of bad things and all of them are released into the world, it's a good thing that expectation, Elpis, is still in the jar, because all these terrible things are out in the world, but at least we've still got hope. We've got expectation kind of kept safe for us in the jar, held under the lip of the jar, he tells us. And you go, oh, that's great. But in some versions of the story, you can read it that she's hoarding hope

so that we can't have it. It's like all these terrible things are out in the world and we don't even have hope because Pandora's kept it for herself. And of course, if you make the jar full of nice things, you can do the exact same argument in reverse. There are nice nice things in the world but we can't really enjoy any of them because we have no expectation of them because she's still got it and so on and so on and so i think there's a really interesting point to be made that even a very linguistically simple thing with no mistakes involved can still be spun as a negative against pandora and routinely is but there's no real reason why it should be if you translate expectation elpis to mean hope and then it's kept secret in the jar again she becomes a villain how did that happen she didn't do anything but there you go absolutely and if we untangle

that further then if we talk about ancient greeks and their how they viewed pandora i mean natalie it feels like the jar actually doesn't really play any part in this story at all. In the visual form, yeah, that's true. What's the importance of Pandora for ancient Greeks? She's the first woman. Without her, there aren't women. And although Hesiod would disagree with me, the world is worse without women in it. Hesiod would simply rather there were more bees.

I'm not going to lie to you. He's very much against women and pro-bee. And I suppose if if you really like honey i can see how you might feel that way he doesn't he doesn't like women he doesn't like his brother doesn't like women it's impossible not to suspect that his brother eloped with his wife as far as i can tell it's like the whole time i'm reading i'm like dude who hurt you it's like i can never get past it's like why are you saying it wasn't a bee was it you like bees so yeah no there is more than an element of that but yeah it's like i can never get past it's like why is that it wasn't a bee was it you like bees so yeah no there is more than an element of that but yeah it's absolutely right for the ancients you know there was a depiction we don't have anymore but we do have an ancient description of it

of pandora at eye height in the most sacred part of the acropolis the hugely important thing about pandora in terms of visual representation is that before her there aren't women and after her there are women so there she is in the act of being created and that means everything changes you know this is the will of Zeus being embodied he specifically says he wants Pandora to be created now of course you can see that as a as a punishment for the theft of fire but it makes more sense I think to see that at some point, surely Zeus was going to hand over fire to mortal men. It's just Prometheus sneaks in and does it a bit early. He doesn't particularly want a society of people who can't worship him properly because they can't

burn sacrifices. So at some point, he's going to hand over fire. And Pandora comes alongside that. This is the embodiment of the will of zeus change happens and so i don't know i always if i'm feeling generous i always tend to assume that the male writers who get so angry about pandora and indeed the male artists in later time who show her in deliberately conniving kind of way i think yeah we all fear change you know it is difficult isn't it it's hard so how do ancient greek artists let's say on the vessels how do they depict pandora there so she's usually shown kind of coming out of the ground because she's sculpted from clay and so it does look a bit aggro i'm not gonna lie hephaestus and sometimes

other characters as well are trying to release her from the ground and you do that with a sort of mallet you you loosen clay with a sort of mallet. So it does look a bit like that bit in Heathers, where they're all kind of gunning for her with croquet hooks. But it's not a violent scene. They're trying to create her. They're trying to free her from the earth. There's a lost Sophocles play called The Hammerers. There's a satyr play, so a sort of bawdy comic play.

So the satyrs are trying to perhaps to release Pandora from the ground because it sounds like they have hammers. That's what they're called. Sophocles is just this name that seems to always come up. His lost plays, these fragments of lost plays, he just comes up and up. So handy. Helen of Troy, Sappho, Pandora.

He seems to have one for all of these. He's got one for all occasions. He was incredibly prolific. He wrote between 100 and 150 plays. We've got seven. He wrote plays well over 50 you know he would have written three tragedies in a satire play for the Dionysia presumably once a year for what 40 years something like that so yeah he was 84 I think when he died so

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Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. So for the longest time, like following the of ancient greece we've got the ancient rime early medieval period it's always the story of pandora it's centered around you know she's the first woman in greek myths and she has this jar that's always been there so if it's been that way for millennia by the time we get to erasmus which you mentioned earlier why just this one mistranslation of one word why does that stick the box rather than the jar after you know millennia of people telling the story that pandora she's the first woman she has a jar but now she's got a box yeah i'm afraid i think it taps into a sort of really deep seated misogyny, which becomes

incredibly prevalent as Christianity spreads, which is that the fall of man is something that a woman is responsible for. I bow to virtually no one, I think, in my love for Greek myth, but sometimes we just get beaten. And it is true a couple of times with Bible stories, that they just totally override the Greek myth version. I think even classicists, if you ask them who survived the great flood, would be more likely to say Noah than Deucalion, who is the great Greek myth survivor of a huge flood. And I think that's what happens with Pandora. She gets just lost behind Eve, you know, in this notion

that a woman is responsible for everything going wrong. It's so prevalent. So I think, you know, in this notion that a woman is responsible for everything going wrong. It's so prevalent. So I think, you know, there are images of Pandora from the relatively modern world, i.e. not ancient Greece, that predate that Erasmus translation where she is shown with a jar. And there are even a few after him where she's shown with a jar, but very, very few. And even they are determined to make her her evil i'm afraid there's a fantastic painting from before erasmus is it by is it by jean cuz i can't remember now and she's naked because oh my god the one thing which is a hundred percent in he's on is that she's got a beautiful dress and she likes it even he who's furious about women and prefers bees is briefly

charmed by the fact that pandora likes her new frock and yet she is over and over again shown in paintings naked it's like of course she is because otherwise how would we live and so there's this version of her where she is naked except for a sheet which is sort of draped tactfully between her legs and then she's got one hand on her jar and the other hand on a human skull it's like oh okay well this is nice and hot oh no it becomes unwholesome really quickly so yeah there's just a huge temptation to make her a villain she's a beautiful woman so she must be evil the archetypal femme fatale but actually as i've argued before she should be it's like a better french phrase for her it's jolly led she's good bad in hesiod she is calon kakon she is a good bad thing a fine unfine thing you know they're specifically chosen

antonyms and you know we just forget the calon bit or what happens when it gets translated into english over and over again is that the positive quality calon becomes visual and the negative quality kakon becomes moral so she becomes the negative quality, kakon, becomes moral. So she becomes a beautiful evil. You're like, well, that was very clever, wasn't it? But that's not what I, this is basically my t-shirt. I'm afraid that's just not in the Greek. But you know, in the Greek, they are equal terms. So if you're going to make one of them visual, you should say Joliet, she's beautiful, ugly, she's good, bad. I appreciate we kind of did jump over the romans and all of that but do we know at all how the romans portrayed perceived pandora was she important at all to the

romans i don't think she's anywhere near as important and there's a really interesting question there of why that is and i don't have an answer for you i wonder if it's the case that the romans are much more interested in a more martial and nurturing idea of womanhood. You know, for them, for the Romans, women's sort of idealized role is to produce sons who will be able to fight for Rome. It is a really ugly, quite fascistic mindset. That's why they were so popular with fascists of the 20th century. And I wonder if the role of a first woman is simply not required to them in the way that women have been so sublimated into motherhood by the Romans that I wonder if that's what goes wrong.

Which is such a contrast, isn't it, to Athens, as you mentioned earlier, with the Parthenon, the statue of Athena. And so I guess you can understand, therefore, why Pandora becomes so closely associated with athens can we say or with the athenians yeah i think that's right highly yeah i know i do think that's right she is a really important part of that narrative and their story that i mean i suppose that's what myth is isn't it the story we tell ourselves about ourselves at least in part and pandora is very much part of the Athenian city-state image of itself.

Absolutely. When you put a visual representation of a character at the centre of your most sacred space, you are saying something about them, and that is that you value them. Well, let's keep going on then post-Erasmus to a few examples we have of this new, well, maybe not new, but this portrayal of Pandora with the box and this, you know, link with the Christian world and Eve and all of that. Now, there are a few paintings which seem to come to mind straight away.

Rossetti's painting. What is this? It's an absolute corker, isn't it? This is quite something for the Pandora story. It is really something. So the model is Jane Morris, wife of William Morris, with whom Rossetti was having a pretty full-on affair.

It's just extraordinary. She's holding this sort of jeweled casket in her hands. And Rossetti made the box, this version of Pandora's box. And it was sold, I think, with the painting until about the 1950s. And then somewhere along the line, they were separated, or it's been lost anyway, as far as I know. And so she's holding this casket, and it's beautiful. But it's really small. And it's's holding this casket and it's beautiful, but it's really small. And it's definitely the case that as the box gets smaller, its contents become somehow more desirable. You're desperate to know what's in a small box, not in a big box. And a big box is like a crate. That's probably going to be work. There'll probably be a manifest. I'll have to unpack it. But a small box is something thrilling. And so she's holding this small box and it's just just a jar and there's

a tiny kind of plume of smoke orange smoke coming out of one corner literally impossible not to look at it and not go oh that doesn't look good and the thought of their social circle seeing this painting unveiled and presumably william morris being there with his wife and everybody looking at him and looking at her being like dude she's totally banging that guy I find it genuinely compelling but yeah it's a it is a really arresting image of her and you know we're obviously meant to see her as being well if not evil then certainly able to help out if evil is shorthanded let's say and i guess moving on from that which is quite interesting how can we say that whole storyline that portrayal it influences like children's books no greek myths for children's books from the 19th and 20th

centuries it's a source of great irritation to me that Greek myths have been so carefully edited for children because it almost never serves the myth well. And honestly, I'm not even sure it serves children well. And so you get the version, the Tanglewood Tales, the Nathaniel Hawthorne, and in the UK, we had the Puffin, Roger Lancel and Green version, and they are so simplified. I understand it. I get why you don't want to tell the story of you know theseus being a serial rapist but it means that if you're not careful you just tell the story of theseus being a lovely brave hero and it's like well he's only a hero if you're not as phedra is or as ariadne is the half sister of the mine at all and yes ariadne helps him but it's still her half brother and

phedra doesn't help at all and so we're like oh great Theseus overcame the monster yeah well it's only great if you're Theseus and honestly he's a lot more monstrous than the minotaur as far as I'm concerned so Pandora doesn't come out of that well either I'm afraid so when these stories get simplified for children then she absolutely gets I mean they're writing in a christian and much more christian time than we are now and she does just get mapped onto onto eve very carefully so she's sort of greedy or curious or pettish and demanding and as ah here we go the version in nathaniel hawthorne makes he see i'd look like emeline pankhurst it's just outrageous frankly but and those works in turn it's almost like a domino effect they can

influence well i'm sure they have influenced you know tv and media over the past half century i really i honestly believe this and it sounds really trivial but i really don't think it is that one of the biggest problems that we have in trying to undo this sort of really insidious boring misogyny is that people think the version they encountered as a child is the right version and why wouldn't they you're a child at that point you're supposed to think that you know books are always true and that your parents know everything or teachers or whoever is your authority figure you know a secure child is going to have that experience it's a terrible shock when you realize that your parents don't know the answers and have just been making it up this whole time. And so I understand why we want the security of a

kind of nice, clean, tidy, neat version, but there aren't. That's not how myths work. And so I think there is a resistance to accepting the huge plurality of these stories, which were, after all, the ancient Greece, as we shorthandedly call it, is 2,000 years of history. It's as far as we are from Julius Caesar. And it's a huge geographical expanse. At its biggest point under Alexander the Greek, it's enormous. And so it's like, well, of course these stories are emanating across the Greek world.

There are, at the time of Homer, for example, there are rhapsodes composing poets like him working across the Greek world. So of course, there are going to be different versions of these stories. And of course, they're going to contradict each other. Why wouldn't you, if you were a rhapsode playing in Tyrrhynes as opposed to in Thebes, include some Tyrrhynes material? This is your local audience. You want to impress them.

And so what you get is is these contradictory versions of these stories which is why you end up with a version of helen that goes to troy and a version that goes to egypt and why wouldn't you you know people want the kind of local color obviously or the stories wouldn't shift so quickly but they do and so i don't know it always seems to me so sad that we want there to be a sort of proper version of a myth and it's like the proper way to read a myth surely is to be aware that there are all these different versions kind of bubbling up at the same time what's more exciting than that so i said that before we started recording as someone who certainly has had his mind completely blown by it but i'm guessing so

many people have come up to you like in the past years or so and said i had no idea that there was no box at all and that it was actually a jar i mean surely right yeah we think yeah no it's true lots and lots of people are really pleasingly surprised by it which was great news for me because obviously you know i wanted them to be surprised by it as a book and it just is one of those stories where people are like, wait, what? No, I know. Wait, what are you telling? Really? And so, you know, there are loads of things about Pandora, which are interesting, I think. And only one of them is that she doesn't have the thing for which she's most famous. So yeah, it's going to be an uphill struggle, I think, to change language so that people say Pandora's jar instead of Pandora's box. But I find I routinely now get it wrong.

If I'm trying to say the thing that most people say, I say jar by mistake because I'm so used to saying it. So, yeah, maybe I can create a sort of grassroots campaign to get her jar reinstated. We did a podcast not too long ago where we ended up talking about how if the Romans were around today and they saw how they were being portrayed thanks largely to the rise of Christianity in the West as you know these sex-mad decadent orgy loving Romans at dinner parties and all that they'd be absolutely shocked because there's a later thing that's been added to their story by the Christian world. Do you think it would be a similar thing with ancient Greeks if any Greeks were around today and how we portray how we perceive Pandora? Yeah I would really think so. It's always tricky as a classicist, I think, because it means your version. I'm surprised when you say that

about the Romans. I think, oh, is that what everyone thinks about the Romans? Is that really? Is that what you're all saying? Because I'm much more likely, I suppose, to be encountering them in whatever it is I'm supposed to be reading and haven't yet done for work, rather than, I don't know, in a movie or something. So yes, I'm certain that the Greeks would be absolutely baffled because to them, she's half our origin story. You know, why don't we all have Pandora necklaces instead of St. Christopher's? You know, why aren't women celebrating that if you go to somewhere like Cyprus, you're really likely to find je that there's a beautiful representational, very simple knife, I suppose we would say, version of the great goddess who's sort of precursor to Aphrodite. And it's like, well, where's that for Pandora?

Why don't we have a beautiful symbol of her to mean the first woman? I would love that. I'm prepared to wear that jewel just FYI. Well, there we go for all the jewelers listening in. Finally. For the ancients. There we go. It's going to happen, Natalie. Natalie, this has been brilliant. Thanks for having me. Last but certainly not least, once again, your book on Pandora and so many other women in Greek myths and more is called? Pandora's Jar, Women in the Greek Myth. And there will be a sequel, but I haven't got a title for it yet. TBC.

Natalie, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. Anytime. Well, there you go. There was the author, classicist, broadcaster and comedian Natalie Haynes, the awesome Natalie Haynes, explaining all about Pandora. I hope you enjoyed the episode. We'll certainly be doing more

topics around Greek myths in the near future. I can guarantee you that. Our producer elena she's working hard on topics surrounding greek mythology so stay tuned for more things greek myths on the ancients in the near future now in the meantime last but certainly not least if you'd like more ancients content in the meantime well you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below i write a little blurb for newsletter every week. And if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on either Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from, I always greatly appreciate it as we continue to spread the ancients' love further and further afield. But that's all from me, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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