In Greek mythology, Pandora opened a pithos, a large storage jar, rather than a box.
The vessel appears in Hesiod’s account of Pandora in Works and Days. Hesiod uses the ancient Greek word pithos, which referred to a substantial container commonly used for storing commodities such as grain, wine, or oil. The vessel’s size makes the later image of a small jewelry box historically misleading.
The “box” wording became established through translation history. The Renaissance humanist Erasmus rendered the Greek term into Latin as pyxis, meaning a box or container, and that choice influenced later European retellings. English speakers eventually inherited the familiar phrase “Pandora’s box.”
The jar is central to the myth because it contains evils that escape into the human world when Pandora opens it. Hope remains inside in Hesiod’s version, although scholars debate how that detail should be interpreted. The original vessel, however, is one of the myth’s clearest details: it was a pithos.