Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box is the mythical container given to Pandora, the first woman in Greek mythology, created by the gods as part of Zeus's punishment for humanity's reception of the stolen gift of fire from Prometheus. According to Hesiod, each god contributed a gift to Pandora: Aphrodite gave her beauty, Hermes gave her cunning and a deceitful tongue, Athena clothed her in silvery garments, and Zeus gave her a jar or pithos containing all the evils and miseries that would plague humankind. Despite being warned never to open it, Pandora's curiosity overcame her, and when she lifted the lid, hunger, disease, war, toil, and every other affliction escaped into the world. Only Hope, or Elpis, remained inside, caught beneath the rim before it could flee. The phrase Pandora's box, a mistranslation by the sixteenth-century scholar Erasmus who confused the Greek pithos (jar) with pyxis (box), has entered common parlance as a metaphor for any action that unleashes a cascade of unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences.