Pandora. In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus.
As Hesiod related it, each god co-operated by giving her unique gifts. Her other name, inscribed against her figure on a white-ground kylix in the British Museum, is Anesidora, she who sends up gifts.
The Pandora myth is a kind of theodicy, addressing the question of why there is evil in the world. According to this, Pandora opened a jar, in modern accounts sometimes mistranslated as Pandora's box, releasing all the evils of humanity.
Hesiod's interpretation of Pandora's story, sometimes considered as misogynous, went on to influence both Jewish and Christian theology and so perpetuated her bad reputation into the Renaissance. Later poets, dramatists, painters and sculptors made her their subject and over the course of five centuries contributed new insights into her motives and significance.
Hesiod, both in his Theogony and in Works and Days, gives the earliest version of the Pandora story. The Pandora myth first appeared in lines 560-612 of Hesiod's poem in epic meter, the Theogony, without ever giving the woman a name. After humans received the stolen gift of fire from Prometheus, an angry Zeus decides to give humanity a punishing gift to compensate for the boon they had been given. He commands Hephaestus to mold from earth the first woman, a beautiful evil whose descenda