In Greek mythology, the container in Hesiod’s account of Pandora was called a pithos.
A pithos was a large storage jar used in ancient Greece, commonly for grain, oil, or wine. Hesiod’s Works and Days says that Pandora opened a pithos, releasing troubles into the world while hope remained inside. The Greek word is important because the familiar English expression “Pandora’s box” developed from a later translation and artistic tradition rather than from Hesiod’s original wording.
The change from jar to box is often associated with the sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus, whose Latin rendering used pyxis, a word meaning a small box or container. The phrase became much more memorable in English as “Pandora’s box.” This is why modern retellings often show a wooden box even though the earliest literary source specifies a jar.