Hesiod’s Works and Days gives the earliest surviving literary version of Pandora’s story.
The poem, written in archaic Greek around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, presents Pandora as part of Hesiod’s explanation for why human life contains suffering and toil. Zeus sends her to humanity after Prometheus angers him by stealing fire.
Hesiod also discusses Pandora in the Theogony, but the fuller narrative of her creation, marriage, and jar appears in Works and Days. The story is therefore often cited as one of the poem’s best-known myths.
A common mix-up is to call the object a box. Hesiod describes a large storage vessel, and later translation and retelling turned it into the familiar “box.”