Everyone gets Pandora's box wrong
The short answer
Everyone gets Pandora's box wrong.
In Hesiod's original Greek myth it wasn't a box at all: it was a pithos, a great big jar. The "box" came from Erasmus's slip about 500 years ago... and only Hope stayed inside.
The story, line by line
- Everyone gets Pandora's box wrong.
- Picture this... you've just found the most famous box in history.
- You lift the lid... just a crack...
- and out fly all the troubles of the world! Quick, shut it!
- But here's the twist... in the original story, it wasn't a box at all.
- The Greek poet Hesiod called it a pithos... a great big jar!
- So where did the box come from?
- About five hundred years ago, a scholar named Erasmus wrote box instead of jar... and it stuck!
- But the one thing that stayed inside the jar?
- Hope.
- So... want to open it again?
Where this comes from
We checked every line of the video against these published sources.
- Hesiod, Works and Days (Perseus, Tufts University)
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