According to Hesiod, evils escaped from Pandora’s jar after she opened it.
The story appears most fully in Hesiod’s Works and Days, composed in archaic Greece. The gods create Pandora and send her to Epimetheus, who accepts her despite Prometheus’s warning. Pandora then opens the large storage jar, releasing the harmful troubles that afflict humanity.
Hesiod’s account does not describe a small box. The Greek word is pithos, a large earthenware storage vessel. The familiar English expression “Pandora’s box” developed later, especially through a Latin translation that used pyxis, a word for a box or container.
The myth is often summarized as releasing every evil into the world, but the ancient text’s details are more literary than a modern catalog of named diseases or disasters. After the evils escape, Hope remains inside the vessel, producing one of the story’s most debated details: whether it was kept there or simply had not yet escaped.