Pandora
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2021
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
"Rock star classicist" and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. In these series she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.
Today Natalie stands up for Pandora, she of the box. Which turns out to have been a jar, and not a box, or a casket, or any of the other receptacles that have been depicted as containing all sorts of evils, and of course hope. It's Erasmus' fault, for a 16th century mistranslation.
A mythological equivalent to Eve with a bit of Sleeping Beauty thrown in, Pandora is described as 'beautiful evil', an irresistible punishment meted out on mankind by the god Zeus, who is annoyed with Prometheus for stealing fire. Pandora is made from clay and given a lovely silvery dress by Athene, and from her all women are descended. Once her jar is opened by Epimetheus (he was warned! but he didn't listen), and all the evil flies out, then mankind's carefree life is at an end. So, not really Pandora's fault at all.
With Professor Edith Hall.
Producer Mary Ward-Lowery
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:08.8 | Today I'm standing up for Pandora. |
| 0:13.8 | Pandora is one of a really small number of characters in Greek myth, |
| 0:19.0 | who has come to be in regular usage, I guess I would say, |
| 0:22.6 | in English. More of this program is going to be about words than I ever dreamed possible. |
| 0:27.0 | So advance apologies for those of you who hate linguistics. I really am sorry. It's the way it's |
| 0:31.6 | gone. But I think it's fair, isn't it, to say that Pandora is one of the few people who's |
| 0:36.0 | made it into English language. |
| 0:42.1 | We have Achilles heel, I guess, but Pandora's box is a pretty well-known phrase. |
| 0:45.3 | It gets used quite often and doesn't have to be explained. |
| 0:50.9 | Anyone who embarks on a course of action with negative reactions or negative consequences, |
| 0:54.6 | they are described as opening Pandora's box or sometimes opening a Pandora's Box, which I find a really interesting use of the article, but I acknowledge that |
| 0:59.0 | the person who's interested in that is probably just me. But it's a phrase and idea that |
| 1:04.0 | obviously plays into something bigger than that. You know, this phrase has, there's a Donner-Summer |
| 1:09.1 | record called Pandora's Box. |
| 1:13.7 | There is, I think I'm right to say, an Erosmith's song. |
| 1:20.3 | But that may just be because Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith liked thinking about a woman named Pandora who was both proud. |
| 1:21.8 | And let me just check my notes. |
| 1:22.5 | That's right. |
| 1:23.9 | Well endowed. |
| 1:29.2 | She's probably known best to us, I think, today, other than in her linguistic form, |
| 1:35.8 | in artworks and paintings in particular. I think perhaps the most famous one I know of is the Rosetti painting from 1871, which shows Pandora opening just the Pandora's box we might have |
... |
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