Pandora's Box

Hesiod's Pandora, reset inside a Mesoamerican temple of trade. Here is the great fact almost everyone gets wrong: Pandora never had a box. In the original Greek she opens a pithos, a huge storage jar, and it only became a "box" when Erasmus mistranslated the word in the 16th century. Out flew every ill into the world, leaving just hope behind. Wiedijk reopens that jar with its lid full of stars, sends a spirit flying up into the leaves, and lets the released evils sprout as a floor of glowing lightbulbs. The oldest warning of all, that some curiosity can never be undone, turns out to fit a conquered new world as snugly as it ever fit the old one.