Hesiod first recorded Pandora’s jar story in his poem Works and Days. Composed in archaic Greece, Works and Days is a didactic poem combining farming advice, moral instruction, and myths about human origins. Its account says Zeus arranged for Pandora to bring a sealed storage vessel into the human world.
The poem presents Pandora as part of Zeus’s punishment after Prometheus gave fire to humanity. When the jar was opened, destructive forces escaped and only Elpis, commonly translated as hope, remained. Hesiod also tells a related version in his Theogony, making him the earliest known literary source for the myth.
Ancient Greek manuscripts describe a pithos, a large earthenware jar, not a small box. The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” arose much later through translation and artistic tradition. Works and Days therefore matters both as the source of the narrative and for understanding its original agricultural setting.