Pandora
Photocopy reworked with marker and correction fluid
In the oldest source of the story – which Peter, with his training in classical Greek, knew in its original version in Hesiod’s Works and Days – Pandora was the first woman, ideally beautiful and irresistibly seductive. Lifting the lid of her pithos, an urn or large vase – not, as in subsequent mistranslations, a pyxis, or box – she releases all the evils that will beset mankind. Like Eve in the Old Testament, she is a symbol of the power and danger of sexual desire, and the complexity of Peter’s own feelings about women may help to explain the unusually intensive reworking to which he subjects her image.
