赫希爾德(Hesiod)，潘朵拉(Pandora)及希臘厭惡女入(Misogynism)之傳統

Abstract

This paper is devoted to a research on the cultural significance of Pandora, the first woman in Greek civilization, as given in the Theogony and Works and Days of Hesiod. It is necessary, first of all, to establish the status of Hesiod and his works as canonical, part of the so called Panhellenic poetics, which reflected as well as shaped the polis ideology regarding woman. Woman in this ideology is conceived as the factor of otherness accounting for the irredeemable alienation of mankind from the happy commensality which they once enjoyed with the immortal beings (section 1). The creation of woman by Zeus as a punishment for mankind was prompted by Prometheus' deceptive division of the sacrificial meat at Mekone and his stealth of fire to mankind Therefore the introduction of woman into this world coincided with the creation of civilization. The cultural significance of Pandora is that her introduction brought mortality and deficiency to the human conditions and thenceforth human beings needed women to perpetuate the species and had to cultivate the land to survive. There existed a close connection between sacrifice (which defines the relationship between the divine and the mortal), agriculture (the relationship between men and nature) and marriage (the relation between male and female). These kinds of activities were regarded by the Greek as constitutive of civilization, marking them from the barbarians and the wild nature, but they were also signs that revealed this loss of onetime fellowship with gods (sections 2 & 3). The origin of woman as such and woman with such an origin have an implication for the Greek view of sexuality and reproduction, which presupposes an economy of scarcity and a zero-sum view of resources. Therefore, Hesiod regarded that female sexuality did not lead to productivity but to the destruction of man's substance, in property as well as in health. Child, encoded as ”hope” and perceived as the only redemption in a world full of pains and evils, should be limited to a single one. The function of child is conceived in terms of the maintenance of the dynamics of masculine acquisition and so fatherhood was debased to a kind of instrument in order to protect the accumulation of wealth within the patrilineage. The pessimistic tone implied in this economy of scarcity becomes even clearer if one compares it with similar passages in the Genesis, an utterly different perspective, revealing the will of God which encouraged Adam and Eve to cover the world with their offspring and to enjoy the very abundance that God promised and created for them (section 4). Works and Days provides us with an excellent narrative on this economy of scarcity. The key term to this kind of construction is the pithos (jar) that went with Pandora, which can be interpreted either as the storing jar that preserved the property as well as the womb that produced and housed the child. This corresponds to the Greek cultural configuration of female body as consisting of an upper exist and a lower exist. Pithos in this sense should be potentially (re-) productive. Yet, if the Greek woman was construed as voracious in food, so was she in sex (section 5). Her creation was seen as unwelcome, but necessary in this kind of human conditions because she could produce the only hope in a world of disappointment. In the Theogony Hesiod took a different drive, with a stress on the close relation between sex and power. This main theme is the myth of succession crisis, which saw a son overthrow his father by a control of female sexuality. If Zeus could finally establish a lasting regime, this is attributed to Zeus in his success in the incorporation of female sexuality within himself and reduced the role of goddesses to nothing other than kourotrophos, the foster-mother of the child, and thus deprived them of ability for birth. Therefore, the patriarchy of Zeus is based on a full control of female sexuality. This denial of woman's productivity constitutes an act of matricide. A tentative conclusion is therefore reached: Hesiod's myth of Pandora is ultimately a myth of order and ordering, in its sublimation of man's fear of female sexuality into an cultural ideal (section 6). The final section (section 7) is an excursus on Semonides of Amorgos, with an inquiry into his radical approach toward the concept of woman as complete ”otherness”, a denial of Hesiod's opinion that there was a category that could be named as genos gynaikōn. This is a further step in the debasement of woman. A Chinese translation (section 8), based on Greek text, of his Iambic Satire on Woman is attached to this section as a coda to this essay on the myth of Pandora.