Meaning
A source of troubles that, once opened, cannot be closed again - a situation, decision, or line of inquiry that looks containable and releases far more harm than anyone expected. The phrase is nearly always used in warning: do not open that box. Standard across registers; strictly the myth's container was a jar, a detail worth keeping in origin discussions, and 'hope' inside it is debated, not settled. Regional use: General English; Greek origin via Latin translation.
Origin
In Hesiod's Works and Days, from about 700 BC, Zeus sends Pandora to Epimetheus with a storage jar - a pithos, the big clay vessel that also served as a burial jar - and she lifts the lid, releasing harsh toil and grievous sicknesses upon the world, with only Hope (elpis) left inside when she shuts it. The box is a mistranslation: the humanist Erasmus rendered pithos as pyxis, box, in his Latin Adagia of 1508, and the smaller container stuck. What Hope's retention means remains genuinely contested - M. L. West read it as a comfort kept for humanity, Mark Griffith as a blessing withheld, and Nietzsche as the most evil of evils because it prolongs torment. The figurative phrase follows: Letitia Landon's novel Ethel Churchill already had 'There was an evil in Pandora's box / Beyond all other ones' in 1837, and Wiktionary now files it beside can of worms and the genie out of the bottle.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- open a Pandora's box
- open Pandora's box
- Pandora's boxes
Usage Examples
- The expenses audit opened Pandora's box: by March, three directors and both auditors had gone.
- Allowing appeals on refereeing decisions would be a Pandora's box, the panel warned, once fans saw the first overturned goal.
- Genetic editing holds immense promise and a Pandora's box nobody has agreed how to seal.