What Elpis being left behind in Pandora’s jar meant to the Greeks, and what it might mean for us today, have been matters of intriguing debate amongst scholars and thinkers since the invention of writing and perhaps even before that. For some it reinforces the terrible nature of Zeus’s curse on man. All the ills of the world were sent to plague us, they argue, and we were denied even the consolation of hope. The abandoning of hope, after all, is often used as a phrase that preludes the end to caring or striving. Dante’s gates of hell commanded all who entered there entirely to abandon hope.
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