Hesiod’s Works and Days contains the detailed account of Pandora opening her container.
Works and Days is an early Greek didactic poem focused on practical and moral instruction. It discusses farming calendars, hard work, justice, social behavior, and the harsh conditions of human life. The Pandora episode supports that theme by explaining how troubles came to exist among mortals.
Hesiod also refers to Pandora in the Theogony, but the Works and Days passage gives the fuller sequence: Zeus’s response to Prometheus, Pandora’s creation, her marriage to Epimetheus, the sealed vessel, its opening, and the remaining hope. This is why the poem is the most specific ancient literary source for the familiar story.
The title is sometimes written Erga kai Hēmerai in transliterated Greek. “Works and Days” is the standard English title and should not be confused with Homer’s Iliad or with Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica, both of which belong to different poetic traditions.