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Pandora’s role as the ancestor of all women was far more important than her disputed role in opening the world to incessant evil. Even if, for Hesiod, these two amount to much the same thing.
Just as Deucalion (the survivor of the Great Flood in Greek myth) has been largely forgotten while Noah and his ark sail cheerily to salvation, so Pandora has been approximated or replaced by Eve.
It is that the fruit is delicious precisely because it is forbidden. The act of prohibition makes the withheld item more alluring than it could ever otherwise have been.
The punishment for having been considered beautiful by the enemy is to be turned into something less beautiful, as viciously as possible.
Every crime committed requires an act of retribution to satisfy the dead:
It is hard to measure the impact of something by the absence of work it inspires, but there are surprisingly few vase paintings which show this part of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s story, even fewer which show the specifically Aeschylean version.
The easiest person to fool is the one who wants to be fooled.
Margaret Garner, on whose story Morrison’s novel was based, was described as ‘The Modern Medea’ in Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1867 painting of her, held by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
