Hesiod first gave the full surviving story of Pandora and her jar in Works and Days.
Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Works and Days is a didactic poem concerned with labor, justice, agriculture, morality, and the difficult conditions of human life. The Pandora episode appears in that larger discussion of why hardship exists.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, but Works and Days provides the more developed narrative. It describes the gods’ role in creating her, her arrival at Epimetheus’s home, and the opening of the storage jar that releases troubles.
Homer is often named when people think of early Greek mythology, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide this complete Pandora story. Ovid wrote much later in Latin and is not the source of the earliest surviving account. The spelling “Hesiod” is the standard English form of the poet’s name.