Hesiod’s Works and Days, the earliest surviving Pandora account, was composed around 700 BCE. The poem belongs to Greece’s early Archaic period and is usually dated near the beginning of the first millennium BCE.
Works and Days is not simply a mythological narrative. It addresses farming, seasonal work, inheritance, justice, and the relationship between humans and the gods. Pandora’s story appears as part of an explanation for why human life includes toil, disease, and other troubles after an earlier age of greater ease.
Dating ancient poetry cannot normally be reduced to a securely documented publication year. Scholars use language, social references, literary comparison, and the poem’s relationship to other early Greek works to establish an approximate date. “Around 700 BCE” is therefore a conventional scholarly estimate, not an exact timestamp.
The poem is traditionally attributed to Hesiod, who is often placed roughly in the same broad era as Homer. Unlike a modern book, it circulated through oral performance before being preserved in written manuscripts centuries later.