# Pandora's Jar  ## Metadata - Author: [[Natalie Haynes]] - Full Title: Pandora's Jar - Category: #books ## Highlights - Dido, the Phoenician queen who founded the city of Carthage. To me, Dido was a tragic heroine, self-denying, courageous, heartbroken. To my interviewer, she was a vicious schemer. I was responding to her in Virgil’s Aeneid, he was responding to her in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. I’d spent so long thinking about ancient sources I’d forgotten that most people get their classics from much more modern sources (Marlowe is modern to classicists). ([Location 61](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B086MR2BRP&location=61)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The model was Jane Morris, wife of the artist William, with whom Rossetti had been having what we can reasonably conclude was a thrilling affair. Critics asked themselves what William Morris might think of a work showing his wife in such an undeniably erotic light, painted by another man. Fewer people thought to ask how Jane Morris must have felt to see herself illustrating the description of Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony as kalon kakon5 – a beautiful evil. And no one asked what Pandora might have thought of the object she was holding so tightly, so dangerously in her beautiful hands. ([Location 118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B086MR2BRP&location=118)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Hesiod raises one last conundrum when he tells us that Elpis – Hope – remains beneath the lip of the jar. Is this a good thing for mortal men, or a bad one? Do we think Hope is being saved for us inside the jar? Or is it being withheld from us? All the evils which were inside are now out in the world, so would we be in better shape if Hope travelled among them? At least then we might have some positivity to raise our spirits (obviously, this doesn’t work if, like John Cleese in Clockwise, we ‘can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand’). Is Pandora committing one more act of petulant cruelty by making our lives miserable and then depriving us even of Hope? Or is the jar a safe place, where we know we will always have Hope, as we traverse a world which is now so much more frightening than it was before the jar was opened? Scholars have been divided on their reading of this passage, not least because, although elpis is usually translated as ‘hope’, it doesn’t quite mean that. Hope is intrinsically positive in English, but in Greek (and the same with the Latin equivalent, spes) it is not. Since it really means the anticipation of something good or bad, a more accurate translation would probably be ‘expectation’. Before we can worry about whether it’s advantageous to us that it remains in the jar, we first have to decide if it is intrinsically good or bad. This is a genuinely complex linguistic and philosophical puzzle. No wonder it’s easier to just blame Pandora. ([Location 211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B086MR2BRP&location=211)) - Tags: [[blue]]