Men Gifts Biography
(Source google.com)
Gift", thus
"the all-endowed", "the all-gifted" or "the
all-giving") was the first human woman created by the gods,
specifically by Hephaestus and Athena on the instructions of Zeus. AsHesiod
related it, each god helped create her by giving her unique gifts. Zeus ordered
Hephaestus to mold her out of earth as part of the punishment of humanity for
Prometheus' theft of the secret of fire, and all the gods joined in offering
her "seductive gifts." Her other name, inscribed against her figure
on a white-ground kylix in the British
Museum , is Anesidora,
"she who sends up gifts," up implying "from below" within
the earth. According to the myth, Pandora opened a jar (pithos), in modern
accounts sometimes mistranslated as "Pandora's box" (see below),
releasing all the evils of humanity—although the particular evils, aside from
plagues and diseases, are not specified in detail by Hesiod—leaving only Hope
inside once she had closed it again. She opened the jar out of simple curiosity
and not as a malicious act. The myth of Pandora is ancient, appears in several distinct
Greek versions, and has been interpreted in many ways. In all literary
versions, however, the myth is a kind of theodicy, addressing the question of
why there is evil in the world. In the seventh century BC, Hesiod, both in his
Theogony(briefly, without naming Pandora outright, line 570) and in Works and
Days, gives the earliest literary version of the Pandora story; however, there
is an older mention of jars or urns containing blessings and evils bestowed
upon humanity in Homer's Iliad: Hesiod also outlines how the end of man's Golden Age, (an all-male society of immortals who were reverent to the gods, worked hard, and ate from abundant groves of fruit) was brought on by Prometheus, when he stole Fire from Mt. Olympus and gave it to mortal man, Zeus punished the technologically advanced society by creating woman. Thus, Pandora was created as the first woman and given the jar (mistranslated as 'box') which releases all evils upon man. The opening of the box/jar serves as the beginning of the Silver Age, in which man is now subject to death, and with the introduction of woman to birth as well, giving rise to the cycle of death and rebirth.
The immortals know no care, yet the lot they spin for man is
full of sorrow; on the floor of Zeus' palace there stand two urns, the one
filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones. He for whom Zeus the lord
of thunder mixes the gifts he sends, will meet now with good and now with evil
fortune; but he to whom Zeus sends none but evil gifts will be pointed at by
the finger of scorn, the hand of famine will pursue him to the ends of the
world, and he will go up and down the face of the earth, respected neither by
gods nor men. The Pandora myth first appears in lines 560–612 of Hesiod's
poem in epic meter, theTheogony (ca. 8th–7th centuries BC), 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 Hephaestusto mold from
earth the first woman, a "beautiful evil" whose descendants would
torment the human race. After Hephaestus does so, Athena dresses her in a
silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands and an ornate crown of silver. This
woman goes unnamed in theTheogony, but is presumably Pandora, whose myth Hesiod
revisited in Works and Days. When she first appears before gods and mortals,
"wonder seized them" as they looked upon her. But she was "sheer
guile, not to be withstood by men." Hesiod elaborates (590–93):
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