Pandora's box

When Prometheus stole fire and gave it to mortals, Zeus resolved to answer the gift with a gift of his own. He had the gods fashion the first woman, Pandora, and each of them laid a grace upon her: beauty, charm, a quick tongue, a curious mind. Then Zeus sent her down to earth to be married to Prometheus's trusting brother.

She came with a sealed vessel, and one instruction that went with it: never open it. Whose the vessel was, and what it held, no one told her. It simply sat in the house, closed, day after day, while the gift the gods had given her most fully, her curiosity, worked quietly away at the seal.

At last she could bear it no longer. She lifted the lid, only a little, only to look. And out of that narrow gap poured every hardship the world had never known before: sickness, sorrow, hunger, envy, old age, and death, scattering into the air like a swarm and never to be gathered back.

Pandora slammed the lid down in horror, too late for all that had already flown, but in time to trap the one thing still resting at the bottom. That last thing was Hope. And so, the story ends, mortals carry every grief the vessel loosed, yet keep with them still the small stubborn thing that stayed.

A curious footnote sits over the whole tale. The oldest Greek word for what Pandora carried was pithos, a great clay storage jar, taller than a person and set into the ground. Centuries later a scholar translating the myth reached for the wrong word and wrote box instead. The mistranslation stuck, and so in English we open a box that the Greeks always knew as a jar.