Kaitlyn Boulding (University of Washington)
The myth of Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony (560-612) and Works and Days (47-105) is an etiology not only for women but also for the qualities that distinguish humans from the gods: fire, technology, sacrifice, and marriage exchange (Vernant 1990). The archetypal woman, as kalon kakon, is characterized by both her appetitive desires and the desire provoked for her (Zeitlin 1995). She is a stomach and a womb. David Sedley draws a connection between the introduction of the necessary afflictions of the body in the Timaeus and the myth of Pandora, reading both as the “planned intrusion of moral badness into the world” (2010). In this paper I elaborate on Sedley's work by exploring correspondences between the Hesiodic myth of Pandora and the introduction to the creation of the body in the Timaeus (63c-d). I do so by examining the structure of reiteration, the motif of delegation, and the repetition of keywords in the two Hesiodic Pandora episodes and the creation of the body in the Timaeus. Employing this intertext to the introduction of gender difference in sexual and alimentary appetites, I build upon the recent feminist reinterpretations of the dialogue (Bianchi 2006, 2020; Brill 2015).
Ultimately, I argue that Timaeus adapts the Pandora myth in his etiology of the human body. Although he applies the gendered hierarchy of the Hesiodic myth to the divisions of the soul as mapped onto sections of the body (70a), he revises the association between stomach and womb by segmenting these organs and introducing a gendered difference to desire. The stomach is no longer a source of gluttony, but rather a protection from it (72e-73b), while the “difficult and violently irritable” womb famously wanders as “an indwelling animal desirous of childbearing” (91c). Indeed, Timaeus overlays grammatical genders onto the vocabulary he assigns to male and female desire, eros for men but epithymia for women (91c). Positing a masculine prototype in place of a Pandora, Timaeus endows masculinity with the generative force that will ultimately produce the differentiation of becoming needed to fill the kosmos. I conclude by showing how a critique of Timaeus’ cosmogony of gender is built into the dialogue itself through Socrates’ call for the women’s natures “to be tuned to men” (18c).