Keyne Cheshire, Davidson College
This paper proposes that the arrangement of the account of Pandora’s pithos (Hesiod, Works and Days, 94-105) has a parallel in a regular narrative sequence in the Iliad and Odyssey that suggests Ἐλπίς (96) and her enclosure in the pithos hold no positive connotation for Hesiod’s episode.
While Aristarchus (Pertusi, 97a), Verdenius (66-71), and Leinieks (1-8) have interpreted this Ἐλπίς as the expectation of ills, and while Beall (227-230) has argued that she is one of many beneficial spirits originally in the pithos, most modern scholars have seen her as the deluded hope that causes humanity to be blindsided by the countless woes (μυρία λυγρά, 100) Pandora scattered from the pithos. And yet many of these same scholars also ascribe to the Ἐλπίς of this episode an additional, uplifting quality: “The objects released from the jar are…palliated by…hope” (Kirk, 231), a “comforting…antidote to present ills” (West, 169), “a bright spot” (Nelson, 67), “able to help human beings look past a present evil to future good” (Caldwell and Nelson, 65), “a blessed illusion” (Vernant 1980, 185) that alone “can enable a person to live this…existence” (Vernant 1989, 85). “Only Hope makes mortality bearable” (Clay 2009, 78, cf. Clay 2003, 103, 124).
The order in which Hesiod’s episode treats the results of Pandora’s actions already tells against such a hopeful reading. Through a striking hysteron proteron, the narrator focuses first on the closure of Ἐλπίς within the pithos (96-99) and only then on the countless woes (100-105) scattered from the jar beforehand, thus concluding with and emphasizing unpredictable human suffering. This interpretation finds further support in a regular narrative sequence in the Iliad and Odyssey, where the narrator depicts a character as having an expectation (expressed by ἔλπομαι) that is then dashed. In the Iliad, for example, the Trojans expect to take Patroclus’ body (17.234), Sarpedon expects to win glory (12.407), and Dolon supposes Odysseus and Diomedes are Trojans (10.355). In all 19 such cases of ἔλπομαι used by the narrator in the Iliad, the characters’ expectations prove wrong, often tragically so.
In the Homeric works this sequence can effect suspense followed by tragic recognition, as the expectation motivating a character to act proves misguided, and their effort fruitless. Hesiod’s pithos episode features this same mechanism in abstract terms, treating first Ἐλπίς and then the countless woes that threaten to defy one’s expectations. It is no sustaining hope for humankind that Hesiod presents, but the notion of mortal expectation doomed. Given, furthermore, that in 1/6 of the non-dialogic uses of ἔλπομαι in the Iliad (and 1/3 in the Odyssey) the narrator calls his expectant characters νήπιοι (“fools”), Hesiod’s pithos account seems even less a depiction of hope’s place generally in the human condition and all the more a damning critique of the expectations of those Hesiod himself calls νήπιοι: the gift-eating kings (40) and his own brother, Perses (286, 397, 633).