Hesiod’s Works and Days, the main ancient source for Pandora’s myth, was composed around 700 BCE.
Works and Days is an early Greek didactic poem traditionally attributed to Hesiod. It combines advice about farming and justice with myths explaining the human condition, including the story of Pandora. Its date is approximate because no contemporary document gives an exact year, but scholars generally place Hesiod in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE.
The poem describes Zeus’s punishment of humanity and the creation of the first woman. It also presents the container’s contents as destructive forces that spread among humans after Pandora opens it. The familiar English expression “Pandora’s box” comes from later tradition; Hesiod’s Greek text refers to a jar or storage vessel.
Works and Days is not a modern prose myth collection. It is a poem shaped by archaic Greek ideas about labor, justice, gods, and human decline. That context explains why Pandora’s story appears alongside agricultural and moral instruction.