Pandora's Box Trivia
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48 free Pandora's Box trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Pandora's box trivia quiz starts with the myth as Hesiod told it around 700 BC: Zeus's revenge for stolen fire, Hephaestus shaping the first woman, the gifts of the gods, foolish Epimetheus, the jar of evils and the hope left inside — and the argument that has raged ever since about what that hope means. It then follows the box through history and culture: how Erasmus turned a jar into a box, Homer's two urns, Aesop's jar of blessings, Pandora as Eve, Renaissance prints that blamed her husband, Rossetti and Magritte, Pabst's 1929 film with Louise Brooks, and everything else that has borrowed the name — a moon of Saturn, Avatar's Pandora, the streaming service, the charm bracelets and the Pandora Papers. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation. Enjoy this one? Try our Greek Mythology and Zeus quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the film Avatar, what are the tall blue-skinned natives of the moon Pandora called?
The Na'vi
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.
Q 02In the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, Lulu ends up destitute in London and is killed by whom?
Jack the Ripper
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.
Q 03Which Greek philosopher famously made his home in a pithos, the kind of huge jar Pandora opened?
Diogenes
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.
Q 04Which 16th-century humanist is usually blamed for mistranslating Pandora's jar as a box?
Erasmus
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.
Q 05Which looter-shooter video game series is mostly set on a lawless planet called Pandora?
Borderlands
Borderlands. Players are Vault Hunters, fortune seekers drawn to Pandora by rumours of alien riches sealed inside its hidden Vaults.
Q 06Which hero eventually freed Prometheus by killing the eagle that tormented him?
Heracles
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.
Q 07Which god physically fashioned Pandora from earth?
Hephaestus
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.
Q 08In Greek myth, who was Pandora?
The first human woman
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.
Q 09What did Hermes give Pandora, according to Works and Days?
A shameless mind and a deceitful nature
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.
Q 10What does the name Pandora mean, in Hesiod's telling?
All-gift
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'.
Q 11Whom did Zeus give Pandora to?
Epimetheus
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.
Q 12What warning did Prometheus give his brother that went unheeded?
Accept no gifts from Zeus
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.
Q 13Which adventure film series sent its lead racing to find Pandora's Box in a 2003 sequel?
Tomb Raider
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.
Q 21Which brother of Prometheus was condemned by Zeus to hold up the sky?
Atlas
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.
Q 22In later Greek accounts, which daughter of Pandora survived the great flood as the wife of Deucalion?
Pyrrha
Pyrrha. After the flood she and Deucalion repopulated the earth by throwing stones over their shoulders: his became men and hers became women.
Q 23Which biblical figure did early Church Fathers treat Pandora as a 'type' of?
Eve
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.
Q 14What is the Greek word for the hope left behind in Pandora's jar?
Elpis
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.
Q 15In which mountain range did Zeus have Prometheus chained as punishment for stealing fire?
The Caucasus
The Caucasus. In the Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound the captive Titan stays defiant, reciting everything he taught mankind, from numbers and writing to medicine.
Q 16Which moral does Hesiod draw to close his story of Pandora's jar?
No one escapes the will of Zeus
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.
Q 17Which philosopher argued that the hope left in Pandora's jar was really the worst of its evils?
Friedrich Nietzsche
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.
Q 18Which epic describes two urns in Zeus's palace, one of evil gifts and one of good?
The Iliad
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.
Q 19In an Aesop fable recorded by Babrius, what did the jar the gods gave mankind hold?
Blessings
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.
Q 20What does it mean to 'open a Pandora's box'?
To start a chain of unforeseen troubles
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.
Q 24In which video game series does the Spartan warrior Kratos open Pandora's Box?
God of War
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.
Q 25Which Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet wrote a sonnet to accompany his red-robed Pandora?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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.
Q 26Which Belgian surrealist painted a 1951 street scene titled Pandora's Box?
René Magritte
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.
Q 27In the Ages of Man that Hesiod tells after Pandora's story, which metal names the age he laments living in?
Iron
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.
Q 28Whose 1929 silent film Pandora's Box starred Louise Brooks as Lulu?
G. W. Pabst
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!'
Q 29The small moon Pandora was found in 1980 in Voyager 1 photos of which planet?
Saturn
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.
Q 30In Avatar, the moon Pandora orbits a gas giant named after which one-eyed giant of Greek myth?
Polyphemus
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.