In Greek mythology, Pandora’s jar was originally called a pithos in ancient Greek texts.
The word pithos means a large storage jar, usually made of clay. Hesiod used the Greek term pithos when describing the container Pandora opened in the myth. It was not necessarily a small box in the modern sense.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” developed later through translation and interpretation. The Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus translated the Greek vessel as a Latin pyxis, meaning a box, in his 1508 edition of Hesiod. That wording helped establish the expression used in English and many other languages.
The pithos itself was a common ancient container for grain, oil, or wine. The myth’s best-known surviving versions appear in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony, although the two poems present different details about Pandora and the release of evils.