Elpis means more than “hope,” it suggests expectation and not only that but expectation of the worst. Foreboding, in other words, dread, an impending sense of doom. This interpretation of the Pandora myth submits that the final spirit locked in the jar was in fact the most evil of them all, and that without it man is at least denied a presentiment of the awfulness of his own fate and the meaningless cruelty of existence. With Elpis locked away, in other words, we are, like Epimetheus, capable of living from day to day, blithely ignorant of, or at least ignoring, the shadow of pain, death, and
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