Review of Natalie Haynes’ book Pandora’s Jar. Women in the Greek Myths

Ever since my first daughter was born, and especially when my daughters were small, I keep returning to one question: what stories am I passing on to them, and what do those stories quietly teach?

Not the obvious ones – the ones we discussed at bedtime, the ones I deliberately pointed out and reflected on with them – but the ones I tell without even noticing. Who gets to be the main hero. Who causes the problem. Who is punished for wanting too much, knowing too much, feeling too much. Who is eventually labeled a “difficult” person.

Natalie Haynes’ book didn’t answer this question for me – it only made it more pressing.

Haynes – a classicist, comedian, and radio presenter – takes ten women from Greek mythology: Pandora, Jocasta, Helen, Medusa, the Amazons, Clytemnestra, Eurydice, Phaedra, Medea, and Penelope – and gives each of them a separate chapter, retelling how their stories have been told, retold, distorted, and used as weapons for three thousand years – mostly by men.

The most striking observation for me comes at the beginning of the book. Pandora, the first woman of the world, the one on whom Western civilization has for centuries placed the blame for human suffering, did not open a box. She had a jar. In Greek – a pithos. The “box” only appeared in the 16th century, when Erasmus translated Hesiod into Latin and made a mistake – and the mistake stuck, uncorrected and unquestioned.

This is the central idea of the book: what we think we know about these women is not entirely true. It is accumulated editing – layer upon layer of retellings, each one pushing the woman a little closer to villainy, further from agency, closer to the role culture needed her to play. A jar became a box. A complex woman became a monster. A powerful woman became a problem.

Haynes’ chapter on Medusa is devastating. Before she became the monster that heroes are meant to slay, she was – in some versions at least – simply a woman, raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple and punished for it. The “snake hair” was a kind of protection – so that no man could ever look at her again. Perseus still kills her, with Athena’s help. The fact that Athena is also a woman, yet helps Perseus rather than the violated woman… says a great deal.

Haynes is first and foremost a classicist, and the book is not entirely even for me. Some chapters are gripping narratives, while others read more like careful catalogues of sources: what Homer said, what Euripides said, what a 4th-century vase painter depicted. The analysis is always deep, but the emotional weight varies across chapters, and so they read differently.

She also tries to be both a popularizer (with references to Beyoncé, scenes from The Simpsons) and a scholar. Most of the time it works, but sometimes it feels slightly disjointed. A reader drawn in by the wit may get lost in dense academic references – and vice versa.

I read the book while one of my daughters was finishing her second year of university and the other was in 11th grade. It is that age when questions about identity arise – about how we become who we are, how much is chosen, and how much is absorbed from culture without us even realizing it has become part of us.

That question – what water does to us while we are swimming in it – is the real theme of this book.

Haynes is careful not to state it too directly, but the implication of each chapter is the same: stories do not only reflect our values, they shape them. A generation of girls raised with Medusa as a monster, a threat, someone to be defeated, will internalize something from that – even unconsciously, even in ways they cannot name. Stories operate at the level where what feels “natural” and what feels like “order” is formed.

I think about this when I remember the stories I tell my daughters, how I describe the women around us and their behavior. When, why, and whether I call them “difficult.” Where did I learn to tell stories this way? Whose editorial hand is in them? Can I consciously recognize it – and, when needed, interrupt it?

The chapter on Penelope was particularly moving for me. Penelope – the loyal, patient, waiting wife, almost universally praised in the Odyssey. But Haynes asks: is Penelope praised for who she is, or for what she does? She is celebrated for restraint. For endurance. For twenty years of waiting. In this story, the “good woman” is the one who stays.

That is also a story. And one worth examining before passing it on.

What makes the book valuable is that it (a) revisits the myths (always useful to revisit), (b) restores women’s voices, and (c) makes us reflect on how we read. I found myself thinking that, well, we cannot all be experts who know exactly how every story “should” be told – and how important critical thinking is, and constant questioning – even if it is exhausting, even maddening, because then what can we trust? How do we live when everything might be an imperfect interpretation?

At the same time, there is no need to dramatize it too much. We simply need to pause and ask: whose version is this? Who benefits from telling it this way? What does it ask the listener or reader to accept as self-evident?

The stories we tell – at bedtime, in classrooms, in the air around us – shape us more than we realize.

Haynes shows that three thousand years of inherited stories have quietly shaped our understanding of what women are, what they deserve, and what happens when they want too much. A jar became a box. A complex woman became a monster. And then came those who began to question. And that opened entirely new ways of seeing and thinking.