In Greek mythology, Pandora’s box was originally a pithos, a large storage jar.
The Greek poet Hesiod used the word pithos for the container Pandora opened. Pithoi were substantial ceramic vessels used in ancient Greece to store products such as grain, oil, and wine. They could be large enough to stand nearly as tall as a person.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” arose through a later translation tradition. In the sixteenth century, the humanist Erasmus translated the Greek term into Latin as pyxis, meaning a box or small container. English and other European retellings then popularized the box image.
The original jar detail matters because the myth’s earliest literary form does not describe a small hinged box. Modern artists often show Pandora opening a decorative chest, but that is an adaptation rather than Hesiod’s wording. The myth is chiefly preserved in Hesiod’s Works and Days, composed in archaic Greece.