Hesiod first recorded Pandora’s story in a surviving Greek poem. His works, written in archaic Greece, provide the earliest surviving literary accounts of Pandora and the container associated with her.
The myth appears in both the Theogony and Works and Days. In the Theogony, Pandora is connected with the creation of women and with Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus helped humans obtain fire. Works and Days gives the fuller narrative of the jar, its opening, and the escape of harmful forces.
Hesiod’s account is earlier than later retellings by Roman and modern authors. Homer does not provide the familiar Pandora story in the surviving epics, although later writers expanded Greek myths in many forms. A common mistake is to treat the modern phrase “Pandora’s box” as Hesiod’s exact wording: his Greek text describes a jar, not a box.