Hesiod’s Works and Days contains the fullest surviving account of Pandora opening the container.
The poem combines practical advice with mythic explanations of why human life includes toil and suffering. In its account of Pandora, Zeus has the gods create a woman as part of his punishment of humanity after Prometheus steals fire. Pandora receives gifts from the gods, is sent to Epimetheus, and opens a sealed vessel whose contents escape into the world.
The story is sometimes attributed vaguely to “Greek mythology” without naming its literary source. The Iliad and the Odyssey are Homeric epics, not the source of this detailed Pandora episode. Virgil’s Aeneid is a later Roman epic and also does not provide the original account.
Works and Days is not simply a myth collection. Hesiod uses the Pandora story to introduce a wider discussion of human labor, justice, agriculture, and the ages of humanity. That context helps explain why the myth functions as an origin story for hardship rather than only as a tale about curiosity.