Hesiod wrote the earliest surviving literary account of Pandora’s jar. The story appears in his poem Works and Days, composed in archaic Greece, probably around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE.
Hesiod presents Pandora as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus stole fire for mortals. The gods give Pandora various gifts, and she becomes connected with the release of evils into the world. Hesiod’s version is the foundation for the later phrase “Pandora’s box.”
The popular name is historically inaccurate: Hesiod describes a large storage jar, not a box. Later translations and artistic traditions helped turn the jar into the familiar box. Hesiod also tells a related version in the Theogony, although Works and Days provides the fuller narrative of Pandora and the jar.
Hesiod should not be confused with Homer. Both are major early Greek poets, but the Pandora story is specifically associated with Hesiod’s works.