In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman among humans. Hesiod’s Works and Days presents her creation as the beginning of womanhood in the human world, following Zeus’s punishment of humanity for Prometheus’s theft of fire.
The myth is not simply a story about curiosity. It also serves as an origin story explaining why human beings experience labor, illness, suffering, and other hardships. Pandora’s arrival introduces a new condition into the relationship between gods and mortals.
Hesiod’s version should be distinguished from later retellings that portray Pandora as an ordinary woman who finds an already existing container. In the older account, she is deliberately fashioned and equipped by the gods before being sent to Epimetheus.
The phrase “first woman” belongs to the mythological framework, not to Greek historical belief about a real individual. Pandora’s role is symbolic and etiological: she explains a feature of human existence through a divine narrative.