The evocative nature of the Pandora story has made Pandora’s name a perpetual favourite for pop music and book and film titles (e.g. Pandora’s Box, Pandora’s Clock, Pandora’s People etc, etc). Pandora’s name appears frequently in technological innovations and science fiction – for example as the name of the planet in a recent sci-fi film called Avatar.
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The Age of Silver
The torrent of evils that Pandora had unwittingly unleashed into the world ushered in the Age of Silver – which, as might be imagined, was less than satisfactory in comparison with the Age of Gold. Children were brought up by their mothers, and kept firmly secured to the maternal apron strings until they went out into the world as fully fledged adults, unable (due to the excessive feminine influences of their upbringing) to keep faith with each other or with the gods. Violence, wanton treachery and sacrilege followed, and those fully grown babies did not live long after leaving the sanctuary of their maternal home. Eventually Zeus ruled the breed a failure, and removed the peoples of the Age of Silver from the earth.
The Age of Bronze
The Age of Silver was followed by the Age of Bronze, an age of war. So seldom did the warriors of this era remove their brazen armour that some later poets described them as being literally made of bronze. War and battles raged in endless succession, and while Ares, the god of war, was in his element, even he had to accept that one could have too much of a good thing. The other gods, particularly mighty Zeus, soon wearied of the Age of Bronze, and it became a question of whether this race of indefatigable warriors would wipe themselves out before Zeus did it for them.
It was a close thing. According to Hesiod, the peoples of the Age of Bronze succeeded in their drive for self-obliteration, but this raises the question of why Zeus went ahead with his plans anyway – for all the tellers of myth are agreed that the King of the Gods raised a mighty flood and the waters swept over the earth and wiped mankind from its face. According to some versions of the tale, the last straw came when a king sacrificed his own son in the perverse belief that this would please Zeus rather than appal him.
Deucalion’s Ark
Prometheus, still in pain-wracked captivity, nevertheless kept abreast of events and watched over his creations – in particular over a child of his own called Deucalion, who had married flame-coloured Pyrrha, the daughter of Pandora. The children of gods are long-lived, and evidently this couple had survived the vicious Age of Silver and the violent Age of Bronze. Prometheus was determined that they would also survive the flood. So Deucalion was ordered to construct an ark for himself and his wife, and in this they rode out the great inundation. Eventually, as the waters receded, Deucalion and Pyrrha found their ark had come to rest on a mountain. Precisely which mountain was much disputed in later ages, with Sicilians, Chalcidians and Thessalians each proposing outstanding bits of their landscape for the honour. However, popular opinion settled, as perhaps the ark of Deucalion did itself settle, upon Mt Parnassus near Delphi, summer home of Apollo and later the home of his oracle.
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ancient and modern dating
It is a happy coincidence that the period referred to by modern archaeologists as the Iron Age largely overlaps with the latter part of the Age of Iron (the early classical era) in the ancient Greek tradition. The earlier Heroic Age of the ancients is in modern terms the archaeological Bronze Age. And if the heroes of myth sometimes act like out-of-control teenagers, it is because they probably were. Archaeology shows that the Bronze Age aristocrats on whom the heroes of myth are based often had short, action-packed lives. Though some might live to their sixties, death was a constant companion which claimed most victims well before then. It was not unusual for women to be mothers at thirteen, grandmothers in their twenties, and dead by thirty.
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The Age of Iron: Humankind Reborn
Zeus had been calmed somewhat after seeing the dramatic effects of his actions, and sent a message to the castaway pair, Deucalion and Pyrrha, through an oracle: ‘Cover your heads and throw the bones of your mother over your shoulder’. After initial puzzlement – for no one knows what had become of Pandora – the pair realized that the mother in question was Gaia, the mother of all – and her bones were the stones that lay plentifully about. Deucalion and his wife did as instructed, and as the stones hit the ground they softened and changed shape. Those thrown by Deucalion became man, and those stones thrown by Pyrrha became woman. Thus were born the first generations of the Age of Iron, the men and women of the Heroic Age whose lives and deeds became the main substance of the mythological corpus.
The Heroic Age was followed by the time in which the tellers of the myths first wove their tales – the age of Homer and of Hesiod. The ‘iron’ of the age referred less to the development of iron tools, for even in Homer’s day bronze was still commonly used, and more to the fact that iron was mundane in comparison to gold, silver or bronze.
Those living centuries afterwards in the later Age of Iron – or as one ancient historian poignantly put it, in the ‘Age of Rust’ – regarded their universe as complete and orderly. The last monsters were gone, slain by the last heroes, and while the gods and other supernatural entities still had a deep interest in and influence on human affairs, they now worked through human or natural agents rather than by hands-on personal intervention.
For those living after 600 BC the world was mature, indeed even elderly. There was no speculation about what age would follow the Age of Iron, because insofar as they thought about it at all, those living in that era believed that it would be followed by the world generally falling into ruin and the end of all things.
Part 2
The Landscape of Myth
The effect of mythology on the Hellenistic world can easily be confirmed by a glance at an atlas. In fact, both ‘Hellenistic’ and ‘atlas’ derive their names from two characters in Greek mythology, Hellen and Atlas.
The Hellenes
We have already seen how Deucalion, the first man, survived the flood and repopulated the world. His son was called Hellen. The children of Hellen settled in Thessaly, and later spread out across the land that became known to the Greeks by the name they still call it today – Hellas.
Other regions of the Greek world were partly named from where the grandchildren and descendants of Deucalion settled:
Dorus moved south and from his name come the Dorian people, who were later to include the Spartans. (The Dorians also give their name to a distinctive type of architecture, ‘Doric’, of which the most striking example is the Parthenon in Athens.)
Xuthus fathered Ion (though others say that he adopted him, and Ion’s true father was Apollo, who seduced Creusa, Xuthus’ wife). Ion became the war leader of the Athenians, who thereafter called themselves Ionians. So too did those people of the islands of the Aegean Sea and the Greeks of Asia Minor, who collectively called their lands Ionia.
Yet in Delos do you most delight your heart, Phoebus [Apollo]; for there the Ionians in their long robes gather with their shy wives and children to do you honour.