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Variations on anesidora4/16/2023 ![]() ![]() 5 I will be exploring several of the other Homeric and Hesiodic passages through the course of the di (.).Framed this second way, my argument does not run counter to the rich symbolic readings that the jar has garnered, but reveals an additional facet to the Hesiodic account that is very much grounded in the artistic/artisanal, social, and economic practices of the age. ![]() A closer look at on going developments in the manufacture and decoration of pithoi, I argue, not only elucidates the kinship between Pandora and the jar that earlier readers have observed, but also suggests that, for all the suddenness of its appearance, the pithos at the end of the Erga account is nothing if not over-determined: whether this capstone element was already a familiar part of the larger story, or whether, as some argue, Hesiod has introduced it as a final piece 4, many of the details that the poet selects for his description of Pandora, her creation, attributes, and properties in the Erga, and perhaps in the earlier Theogony too, turn out also to characterize the pithoi familiar to Hesiod’s audience, making this quite the most appropriate of all objects that could appear (seemingly from out of nowhere since Hesiod does not tell us the vessel’s origin) alongside the καλὸν κακόν devised by Zeus put differently, and in a fashion quite distinct from that proposed by other scholars, Pandora’s pithos recapitulates and re-embodies the heterogeneous motifs of the narrative that precedes it. 4 In the absence of any source earlier or contemporary with Hesiod that tells the Pandora story (a fe (.)Ģ After a brief review of existing answers to the problem, I want, as it were, to put the cart before the horse, to focus on the appearance and function of pithoi that are broadly contemporary with the Hesiodic poems (commonly dated to the end of the eighth and early decades of the seventh century, although nothing allows us to be more precise and the recent tendency is to down-date the compositions), and to work back from these to the textual account.Why, of all possible pots and containers with which Pandora could have been associated, did the poet single out this vessel type? ![]() At least a half dozen articles from the last ten years alone tackle the still outstanding issue of how the poet intends us to understand the contents of that jar: are the elements that escape from it good, as some believe, or bad, as others argue, and, a further sticking point, how should we interpret the nature and significance of Elpis that uniquely remains in the vessel after Pandora replaces the lid 2 ? But lost in this mass of conflicting and ever more subtle readings is the different question posed here: why does Hesiod, or the tradition in which he works, choose to pair the archetypal female with an object that the text so clearly designates a pithos ( Erga 94, 97), an earthenware jar used throughout antiquity principally to store a variety of wet and dry food stuffs 3.
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