Hesiod first describes Pandora opening the container that releases evils into the world. His Works and Days, an archaic Greek poem, is the key surviving source for the famous episode.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, but the detailed account of the container appears in Works and Days. The poem connects Pandora with the consequences of Prometheus’s theft of fire and explains why human life is marked by labor, sickness, and other hardships.
The story is often attributed vaguely to “Greek mythology,” but identifying Hesiod matters because ancient myths did not have one official canonical version. Homer does not provide the familiar Pandora episode, and later writers adapted or reinterpreted material from earlier traditions.
Hesiod’s account is also the reason scholars distinguish the original storage jar from the later box. The Greek pithos in his poem became a pyxis in a Renaissance Latin translation, creating the wording that eventually dominated European retellings.