In Greek mythology, Pandora is commonly described as the first woman. Hesiod’s account presents her creation as a divine response to Prometheus’s theft of fire and Zeus’s resulting punishment of humanity.
The gods assemble Pandora and equip her with gifts before sending her to Epimetheus. Her creation follows the mythic establishment of a human condition in which labor, illness, and other troubles exist. The story is not a modern historical account of human origins; it is a Greek etiological myth explaining why suffering is part of human life.
Pandora’s status as the first woman is sometimes confused with later Greek stories about female figures such as Helen or Eve from the Hebrew Bible. Those figures belong to different traditions. Within Hesiod’s Greek narrative, Pandora occupies the first-woman role.