In Greek mythology, the first woman was not born. She was made — fashioned from earth and water by the smith-god Hephaestus, dressed and adorned by the goddesses, and given her character by the gods of Olympus. Her name was Pandora, and she was a gift from Zeus to humankind: a punishment disguised as a blessing, sent in revenge for the theft of fire by the Titan Prometheus. According to the poet Hesiod, before Pandora arrived men lived free from toil and sickness. After she opened a jar she had been given, every evil in the world escaped. Only Hope remained inside.
Pandora’s story is one of the most famous myths about the origins of suffering, and one of the most discussed. It has been read as a misogynistic fable, as a parable of human curiosity, and as a profound reflection on the mixed blessings of the human condition.
Why Pandora Was Made
The story begins with Prometheus. Twice he had outwitted Zeus on behalf of mortals: first by tricking him into accepting the worse portion of the sacrificial ox, and then by stealing fire from heaven after Zeus had withheld it. (See How Prometheus Stole Fire.) Zeus laughed aloud in his anger and announced his revenge: “I will give them an evil in exchange for fire, in which they will all delight, embracing their own evil.”
The Making of Pandora
Hesiod tells the story twice: briefly in the Theogony and at more length in the Works and Days. In the fuller account, Zeus commanded each of the gods to contribute:
- Hephaestus mixed earth and water and shaped a figure with the face of an immortal goddess and a human voice.
- Athena taught her weaving and dressed her in a silvery gown and an embroidered veil.
- Aphrodite poured grace over her head, along with painful desire and limb-wearying cares.
- The Graces and Persuasion hung golden necklaces around her neck.
- The Seasons (Horae) crowned her with spring flowers.
- Hermes put in her breast “lies and wheedling words and a thieving nature,” and gave her a voice.
Hermes named her Pandora, “because all the gods who dwell on Olympus gave her a gift.” The name can also mean “the all-giving one,” and it may originally have belonged to an earth goddess, a giver of all gifts, before Hesiod turned it into a punishment.
Pandora and Epimetheus
Zeus sent Hermes to deliver Pandora not to Prometheus, who would have seen through the trick, but to his brother Epimetheus (“afterthought”). Prometheus had warned Epimetheus never to accept a gift from Zeus, but Epimetheus took her in, and “only understood the evil when he had it.”
Pandora and Epimetheus had a daughter, Pyrrha, who married Prometheus’s son Deucalion. When Zeus flooded the earth, Deucalion and Pyrrha were the only survivors, and from the stones they threw over their shoulders a new race of humans sprang up. So Pandora is not only the first woman but the ancestor of all humans after the flood.
The Jar
Pandora brought with her a large storage jar, a pithos. When she lifted its lid, the evils inside scattered across the earth: countless sorrows, toil, and diseases that come to men by day and night, silently, since Zeus had taken away their voices. Before this, men had lived “free from evils, without hard toil and grievous sickness.” Only Elpis — Hope, or Expectation — stayed inside, trapped under the lip of the jar when Pandora put the lid back on by the will of Zeus.
The jar became a “box” only in the sixteenth century, through an error by the Dutch scholar Erasmus. The story of the jar, and the long argument over what Hope was doing inside it, is told in Pandora’s Box: What Really Came Out of the Jar.
”The Race of Women”
Hesiod makes Pandora the origin not just of women but of what he calls “the deadly race and tribe of women,” who live with men as a burden, like drones in a beehive eating the honey that worker bees produce. This passage is one of the most notorious expressions of misogyny in ancient literature, and it has shaped Western attitudes for centuries.
It is worth noting, however, that Hesiod’s view was not the only one. The name Pandora (“all-giving”) and a surviving vase painting showing her rising from the earth suggest an older figure, perhaps an earth goddess who bestowed gifts. The Parthenon in Athens featured the creation of Pandora on the base of Phidias’s great statue of Athena Parthenos, surrounded by twenty gods — an image suggesting her creation was a solemn, divine event rather than a mere trick.
Pandora and Eve
Early Christian writers were struck by the parallel between Pandora and Eve in the Book of Genesis. Both are the first woman; both are created after the first man; both are blamed for bringing suffering into a world that had been free of it; both act out of curiosity or disobedience. Tertullian and Origen compared the two directly, and the Renaissance painter Jean Cousin the Elder painted a famous nude titled Eva Prima Pandora (“Eve, the first Pandora”) around 1550.
The parallel is instructive but imperfect. Eve disobeys a divine command. Pandora, in Hesiod’s version, is simply following her nature as the gods made her. Her opening of the jar is not presented as a moral choice at all. The gods designed the disaster; she is its instrument.
Pandora in Art
Pandora was a relatively rare subject in ancient art but became popular in the Renaissance and after. The Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted her in 1871 holding a gilded box with smoke rising from it, with the inscription Nescitur ignescitur (“it is unknown and set afire”). John William Waterhouse painted her in 1896 kneeling by a stream, peering curiously into an ornate casket. The Victorians made her a figure of dangerous feminine curiosity, a kind of beautiful peril.
Interpreting the Myth
The Pandora myth has invited many readings:
- An aetiological myth. It explains why humans must work, suffer disease, and die, while the gods do not.
- A myth of the human condition. Hope’s position in the jar — kept for humans or kept from them — suggests the ambiguous place of expectation in a hard life.
- A myth of gender. For Hesiod, a small farmer suspicious of anyone who might eat his grain, women are an economic burden. Feminist scholars have analysed how the myth encodes a view of women as both desirable and dangerous, created by men’s gods to serve men’s needs.
- A myth of technology. Pandora is a manufactured being, crafted by a smith. Some modern writers have described her as the first android — a beautiful artefact sent with a hidden purpose.
Pandora Today
“Opening Pandora’s box” has become a standard phrase for starting something that cannot be undone and whose consequences are unpredictable. It is applied to scientific discoveries, political decisions, and technologies. Pandora also gave her name to a jewellery brand, a moon of Saturn, the alien world of James Cameron’s Avatar, and a music-streaming service — proof that the first woman of Greek myth is still very much at large.
Last reviewed: September 2026.