I read this version on the internet some time ago. I am going to piece it together the best I can from what I remember of it. I can't seem to find what happened to it. I thought it was very good and made more sense then the first woman story. You decide which makes more sense to you. My version here is very short. But I did not make up this version. I don't really know who did.
Zeus ordered Hephaestus, the god of smiths, to craft a gorgeous woman out of metal. This would make sense since is he a metal smith. If you wanted a woman made out of earth and water why have a smith do it. The beautiful goddess of Love, Aphrodite, was asked to pose as a model. Aphrodite could look like a man or woman at a moments notice. She can look like anyone. That could be why he used Aphrodite instead of Venus. She is known for her great beauty. Was Venus on vacation at the time?
The reason Aphrodite was used was because he wanted a copy of his poor dead Helen. She had recently been hung from a tree. Being an immortal and Zeus's only female child by a mortal woman, he was naturally upset and wanted humans to suffer for hanging poor Helen from a tree.
Helen was of course a man magnet as everyone knows and this got her in trouble after her dear Paris died of old age in Egypt. They were there because they both escaped the fabled Fall of Troy. She came back to Greece and men fell in love with her. These men had wives and they found her one day and killed her by hanging her from a tree.
So it makes sense Zeus is very upset. He is so upset he decides that humans need to pay for all time for what they did to Helen. He can't just wipe humanity out. I think there must be some kind of rule against that kind of thing. So he has Hephaestus, the god of smiths craft for him a copy of Helen made out of Indestructible metal. Hephaestus is well known for already creating twelve robotic handmaidens. Everything he makes for some reason seems to be made of metal. So why he would be using earth and sea in the first myth is kind of odd.
The totally indestructible part is what is important. Humans killed the original Helen. Pandora was given Helen's qwirky and odd personality. But this time they left off the curse of having every man that seen her fall in love with her. The box of course was made out of the same metal that Pandora was made of. And the box was filled with
all the nasty and horrible things that Hades could find to fill it with.
I am thinking it was a group effort between Zues and some of his favorite Gods. So Zues told her that she was supposed to go around
spreading all kinds of ills. In the other story she is pretty much a pawn.
Another thing that bothers me about the other story is this. In the original Zues was mad at humans for getting fire from Prometheus. According to the story he was told to not do it and he did it anyway.
So Zues is mad at humans for getting a gift. I get the part of punishing Promethus he did this when he was told not to. But did the humans even know they were not supposed to accept it. That is the part that is odd. Why punish the third party in this?
I like the other Myth too. Pandora gets revenge on the Greek gods that that used her as a pawn.
