Pandora opened the container that released suffering into the world in Greek mythology.
The story appears most fully in Hesiod’s Works and Days, composed in the eighth or seventh century BCE. Zeus ordered the creation of Pandora after Prometheus gave fire to humanity. The gods presented her with gifts, making her name relate to the idea of being given gifts by all.
Hesiod describes a sealed storage jar, not a box. Pandora opened it despite warnings, and illnesses, toil, and other troubles escaped. Hope remained inside when she closed the vessel.
The familiar expression “Pandora’s box” comes from a later translation tradition. Erasmus’s Latin rendering helped turn the Greek word pithos, meaning a large jar, into pyxis, meaning a box. The myth is therefore often remembered with a different container from the one in Hesiod’s text.