We say someone opened Pandora’s box every day, but the most famous box in history was never a box, and Pandora may not even have been the one who opened it. This deep dive returns to Hesiod around 700 BC, where the container is a pithos, a refrigerator-sized clay storage jar also used for burials, and explains how the Dutch humanist Erasmus swapped it for the Latin pyxis, a small cosmetic box, in his 1508 Adagia, rewriting the image for the entire Western world.

From there we weigh the conflicting ancient traditions about the contents, evils that attacked humanity versus blessings that flew back to Olympus, as depicted in Giulio Bonasone’s engraving of Roman virtues escaping a jar. The episode then dives into the centuries-old debate over elpis, the neutral Greek word for expectation left inside, contrasting the pantry view championed by M.L. West with the prison view and Nietzsche’s argument in Human, All Too Human that hope is the cruelest evil of all. We also follow the shifting blame from Pandora to Epimetheus in Renaissance art, to trickster gods in 18th century French plays, and to the sphinx-adorned urn in Alma-Tadema’s 1881 watercolor.

• Why Pandora and the pithos were both made of clay and what that symmetry meant
• How one scholar’s vocabulary choice during the printing press boom overwrote an ancient symbol
• Theognis and Babrius on a jar of blessings rather than curses
• Hope as fire extinguisher or shot of adrenaline: the pantry, prison and Nietzsche readings
• Epimetheus as afterthought and the Enlightenment’s swap of plagues for greed and envy