Around what year was Hesiod’s Works and Days composed?

Hesiod’s Works and Days was composed around 700 BC.

The poem is one of the principal early sources for the story of Pandora’s jar. It combines advice about farming, justice, labor, and proper conduct with myths explaining why human life contains suffering and toil. The Pandora episode appears in this wider moral and social framework rather than as an independent fairy tale.

The date is approximate because no contemporary manuscript fixes the poem’s composition to a specific year. Hesiod is generally placed in the late eighth or early seventh century BC, and Works and Days is commonly dated to around 700 BC. The poem is usually considered later than Hesiod’s Theogony, though exact chronology remains debated.

The date also places the account in the archaic period of Greek literature. Later authors and artists expanded, altered, or visually reshaped the story, but Works and Days remains the key early literary source for the opening of the container.