48 Fun Facts About Pandora's Box

In the film Avatar, what are the tall blue-skinned natives of the moon Pandora called?

The Na'vi. They stand about ten feet tall, and human scientists walk among them by remotely piloting lab-grown bodies, the avatars of the title.

In the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, Lulu ends up destitute in London and is killed by whom?

Jack the Ripper. At Christmas Lulu invites him up to her garret even though he says he has no money, and the film ends with her death.

Which Greek philosopher famously made his home in a pithos, the kind of huge jar Pandora opened?

Diogenes. The Cynic lived by begging and sheltered in a big clay storage jar in Athens, which is why he is so often pictured sitting in a tub or barrel.

Which 16th-century humanist is usually blamed for mistranslating Pandora's jar as a box?

Erasmus. Retelling the story in Latin in his collection of proverbs, he gave her a box instead of Hesiod's big storage jar, and the slip has stuck ever since.

Which looter-shooter video game series is mostly set on a lawless planet called Pandora?

Borderlands. Players are Vault Hunters, fortune seekers drawn to Pandora by rumours of alien riches sealed inside its hidden Vaults.

Which hero eventually freed Prometheus by killing the eagle that tormented him?

Heracles. He killed the eagle and set the Titan free, and Hesiod says Zeus allowed it so that his son's fame would grow even greater.

Which god physically fashioned Pandora from earth?

Hephaestus. The lame smith god mixed earth with water on Zeus's orders and moulded a maiden with a human voice and the face of a goddess.

In Greek myth, who was Pandora?

The first human woman. Zeus ordered her made as the price men would pay for stolen fire, an evil they would embrace to their own ruin.

What did Hermes give Pandora, according to Works and Days?

A shameless mind and a deceitful nature. Hermes also put lies and crafty words in her, gave her a voice, and then delivered her to her future husband.

What does the name Pandora mean, in Hesiod's telling?

All-gift. Hesiod says every god on Olympus gave her one, though some scholars think he flipped the name of an older earth goddess, the 'all-giving'.

Whom did Zeus give Pandora to?

Epimetheus. In Plato's telling he shared out every useful trait among the beasts and had none left when he came to mankind, which is why his brother stole fire for them.

What warning did Prometheus give his brother that went unheeded?

Accept no gifts from Zeus. Prometheus told him to send any such present straight back in case it harmed mankind, but his brother took Pandora in.

Which adventure film series sent its lead racing to find Pandora's Box in a 2003 sequel?

Tomb Raider. In The Cradle of Life, Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft learns that the box holds a plague, and that her rival, a rogue scientist, wants it opened to wipe out most of mankind.

What is the Greek word for the hope left behind in Pandora's jar?

Elpis. The word can also mean plain expectation, of bad things as well as good, which is why scholars still argue whether keeping it in the jar was a mercy or a curse.

In which mountain range did Zeus have Prometheus chained as punishment for stealing fire?

The Caucasus. In the Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound the captive Titan stays defiant, reciting everything he taught mankind, from numbers and writing to medicine.

Which moral does Hesiod draw to close his story of Pandora's jar?

No one escapes the will of Zeus. Hesiod's proof is the plot itself: Prometheus foresaw the trap and warned his brother, and it closed on mankind anyway.

Which philosopher argued that the hope left in Pandora's jar was really the worst of its evils?

Friedrich Nietzsche. In Human, All Too Human he argued that Zeus gave man hope so that, however much the other evils tormented him, he would go on living and suffering.

Which epic describes two urns in Zeus's palace, one of evil gifts and one of good?

The Iliad. Achilles describes the urns to the grieving King Priam, telling him that Zeus mixes each man's lot from both and that some receive only the evil.

In an Aesop fable recorded by Babrius, what did the jar the gods gave mankind hold?

Blessings. A man with no self-control pushed the lid aside and they flew back up to the gods, leaving only Hope inside to promise their return.

What does it mean to 'open a Pandora's box'?

To start a chain of unforeseen troubles. In the myth they were anything but an accident: Zeus sent Pandora and her jar as his revenge for the theft of fire.

Which brother of Prometheus was condemned by Zeus to hold up the sky?

Atlas. It was his punishment for fighting on the Titans' side in their war against Zeus, and it stationed him at the edge of the earth for all time.

In later Greek accounts, which daughter of Pandora survived the great flood as the wife of Deucalion?

Pyrrha. After the flood she and Deucalion repopulated the earth by throwing stones over their shoulders: his became men and hers became women.

Which biblical figure did early Church Fathers treat Pandora as a 'type' of?

Eve. In both stories the arrival of a woman marks the end of an age of ease, and the early Christian writer Tertullian was already setting the two side by side.

In which video game series does the Spartan warrior Kratos open Pandora's Box?

God of War. In the 2005 original, opening the box gives Kratos the power to kill Ares, the god of the title, and he ends the game as the new god of war himself.

Which Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet wrote a sonnet to accompany his red-robed Pandora?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His sonnet ends by telling Pandora to clench the casket shut, for she can never know whether the Hope still pent inside is alive or dead.

Which Belgian surrealist painted a 1951 street scene titled Pandora's Box?

René Magritte. The title promises a myth, but the picture is a city street with a gentleman under the lamps, the kind of ordinary scene he liked to make unsettling.

In the Ages of Man that Hesiod tells after Pandora's story, which metal names the age he laments living in?

Iron. Hesiod wishes he had died before it or been born after it, and warns that Zeus will destroy this race too, once babies are born already grey-haired.

Whose 1929 silent film Pandora's Box starred Louise Brooks as Lulu?

G. W. Pabst. His film made Louise Brooks an icon: decades later the French archivist Henri Langlois declared, 'There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!'

The small moon Pandora was found in 1980 in Voyager 1 photos of which planet?

Saturn. Pandora was long called a shepherd of the planet's narrow F ring, but it is now thought to stir the ring up, leaving its neighbour moon Prometheus to hold it in place.

In Avatar, the moon Pandora orbits a gas giant named after which one-eyed giant of Greek myth?

Polyphemus. It circles Alpha Centauri A, where in 2025 astronomers using the Webb telescope reported signs of a real gas giant, promptly likened to the film's.

Where did the theme-park land Pandora - The World of Avatar open in 2017?

Animal Kingdom, Florida. Disney put it in its nature park rather than a film park, pitching the floating mountains and glowing rainforest as a celebration of the natural world.

The streaming service Pandora bases its recommendations on which system?

The Music Genome Project. It describes every song by hundreds of traits, from melody and harmony to rhythm and lyrics, then lines up songs whose traits match the ones you like.

The charm-bracelet jeweller Pandora was founded in which country in 1982?

Denmark. Goldsmith Per Enevoldsen began in a small Copenhagen shop selling jewellery imported from Thailand, and in 1989 the firm started making its own there.

What kind of secrets did the Pandora Papers of 2021 expose?

Offshore accounts and shell companies. The leak named 35 current and former world leaders, and more than 600 journalists in 117 countries sifted its 11.9 million files.

Which songwriter behind Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell assembled the girl group Pandora's Box in the 1980s?

Jim Steinman. The group's 1989 album Original Sin was the first to carry 'It's All Coming Back to Me Now', the song Celine Dion made a worldwide hit seven years later.

Which company bought the streaming service Pandora in a $3.5 billion deal completed in 2019?

SiriusXM. The satellite radio company paid in stock and, once the deal closed, declared itself the world's largest audio entertainment company.

Hesiod addresses Works and Days to whom, a man he accuses of cheating him over an inheritance?

Hesiod's brother Perses. The poet says he grabbed the larger share by bribing the local lords, and the whole poem urges him to earn an honest living from the land instead.

Which earlier poem by Hesiod tells of a woman made to punish mankind without ever naming her Pandora?

The Theogony. There she is simply a 'beautiful evil', and the poet adds that a man who dodges her kind by never marrying fares no better: he grows old with no one to tend him.

In what did Prometheus hide the fire he stole for humanity?

A fennel stalk. He carried the flame down inside the plant's stem so that Zeus would not see it, and the theft is what provoked the making of Pandora.

What did Zeus have an eagle do to the chained Prometheus every day?

Eat his liver. Because Prometheus was immortal, the liver grew back every night, so the eagle returned to the same meal day after day.

What does the name of Prometheus's brother mean?

Afterthought. His brother's name was read as 'forethought', and Hesiod has the slower one understand what he had taken in only once the evil was already his.

In some Renaissance prints, who lifts the lid of the jar instead of Pandora?

Erasmus's version, Bonasone's engraving and Farinati's print all put the blame on her husband.

Which novelist, the author of I, Claudius, called Hesiod's tale of Pandora 'an anti-feminist fable'?

Robert Graves. In The Greek Myths he argued that Hesiod probably invented the tale himself, and that Pandora had once been a title of the earth goddess worshipped at Athens.

Which goddess taught Pandora needlework and weaving in Works and Days?

Athena. Weaving was her own craft, and she went on to dress Pandora herself before the Graces hung necklaces on her and the Hours crowned her with spring flowers.

Which tragedian, best known for Oedipus Rex, also wrote a lost satyr play called Pandora, or The Hammerers?

Sophocles. Only fragments survive, but vases showing Pandora rising from the ground among figures swinging hammers may picture a scene from it.

Which American poet wrote The Masque of Pandora in 1876?

Longfellow. His Pandora opens a carved chest and then begs to be killed, not forgiven, but her spouse answers that the fault is his for leaving her alone with it.

Which German writer left an unfinished lyrical drama titled Pandora, written 1807-08?

Goethe. Pandora never appears in what he wrote: the fragment opens at night with her abandoned husband lamenting that she has gone and taken one of their daughters.

Which French composer, best known for his Requiem, gave Pandore a leading role in his 1900 opera Prométhée?

Gabriel Fauré. He wrote it for an open-air arena at Béziers with a cast of hundreds, and reworked Aeschylus so that Pandore became the equal of the chained hero.