We say someone opened Pandora's box every day, but the most famous box in history was never a box, and Pandora may not even have been the one who opened it. This deep dive returns to Hesiod around 700 BC, where the container is a pithos, a refrigerator-sized clay storage jar also used for burials, and explains how the Dutch humanist Erasmus swapped it for the Latin pyxis, a small cosmetic box, in his 1508 Adagia, rewriting the image for the entire Western world.

From there we weigh the conflicting ancient traditions about the contents, evils that attacked humanity versus blessings that flew back to Olympus, as depicted in Giulio Bonasone's engraving of Roman virtues escaping a jar. The episode then dives into the centuries-old debate over elpis, the neutral Greek word for expectation left inside, contrasting the pantry view championed by M. ...