This chapter examines the similarities between biblical and Greek literature regarding the story of the first woman, found in the genealogical traditions of both cultures. Many ancient Near Eastern stories describe the process of the creation of the first humans from clay, and these may have disseminated and influenced the story of the creation of the woman in biblical literature, as well as the story of Pandora (especially the description of Hephaestus as a potter, in contrast to his usual portrayal as a blacksmith). However, Near Eastern literature does not include a comparable story about the creation of the first woman as distinct from the man or one that explains the origin of evil in connection to it. In addition to the unique parallel, it transpires that the Pandora tradition was integrated into the Catalogue of Women and other Greek genealogical traditions within the same sequence as the Flood hero Deucalion.

This chapter starts by exploring the familiar scene at the end of Iliad 18, where the Homeric poet describes a sequence of artefacts that Hephaestus has manufactured: first the self-moving twenty golden tripods that he is in the process of completing, now fitting them out with ‘ears’, then the golden girls, automata, who are filled with ‘voice and strength’, then twenty self-blowing bellows that keep the fire strong, and finally Achilles’ wondrous shield, filled with individuals, animals and other elements that move, speak, sing and grow before our eyes for all (as the poet takes pains to remind us) that they are metal-forged. The Odyssey introduces another set of Hephaestus-forged animated metal goods, the guard dogs standing on the threshold of Alcinous and described in book 7.91–4. The second part of the chapter explores some of the vivified objects that populate archaic hexameter poetry, hybrids that stand at the interstices between the living and inanimate and among which the Hesiodic Pandora claims a place together with several other Hesiodic beings. The discussion’s second half focuses on the late archaic and early classical period, and on a number of figures that appear in Pindaric poetry.

For ancient authors, hope tends to be a dangerous thing. It can set us up for practical as well as moral failure. Elpis, the Greek word we translate as hope, is typically an attitude or emotion that is desiderative and goal-oriented, but it can also denote neutral expectation of evils as well as goods. The first author to treat elpis as an unqualified good, given a very specific object of desire (eternal life in Christ), is St. Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament. Before him, good hopes – including eschatological hopes expressed in other ancient mystery religions – had to be designated as such to be distinguished from bad hopes, which preponderate in Greek literature. But the ancients recognize good hope, foremost in the competitive strife that defines public life. Hope could be seen as a necessary motive, linked to confidence and courage. The ancient world, especially in Jerusalem and Rome, knew also hope in a future ruler, a hope more soteriological than political. Whatever hopes might be expressed for the city-state or empire, the philosophical schools of antiquity developed the case against personal hope and passionate agitation.

This chapter offers a detailed analysis of a(nother) famous Hesiodic narrative, the creation of Woman, that considers Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Biblical comparanda but also looks further, to Nordic mythology, ethnography and the study of folklore. Coupled with an understanding of the Pandora-scene’s connections to episodes of adornment in other early Greek hexameter poetry, the analysis avoids simplistic notions of direct derivation from this or that Near Eastern source, and concludes that the tale of Pandora represents, instead, a Greek poet’s declension of a common Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern mythological motif and compositional pattern.