Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

by Natalie Haynes

She is opening it either because she is curious to see what’s inside, or because she knows what it contains and wants to let it out.

kalon kakon5 – a beautiful evil.

katabasis

it is interesting that only the dead speak, rather than the gods or the living.

Heracles had previously come down to Hades and made off with Cerberus.

that he cannot look back until they have left the valley of Avernus (the entrance to the Underworld).

arduus, obscurus, caligine densus opaca – ‘steep, dark, enveloped in thick fog’.11

If he loved her less, or at least less anxiously, they would make it outside and be free to live and love once again, to enjoy the marriage which was cut short on their wedding day. But, if he had loved her less, he would never have embarked on his terrible journey to the Underworld to reclaim her. The failure of his mission is assured from the moment he undertakes it. There is something cripplingly true about this, isn’t there? That we are so often the authors of our own misfortunes because of the same qualities which make us brave, or hopeful, or loving in the first place.

For Phaedrus, Orpheus is weak because he didn’t die for love.