In Hesiod’s account of Pandora, the Greek vessel usually translated as her “box” is a pithos. A pithos was a large earthenware storage jar, commonly used in ancient Greece for commodities such as grain, oil, or wine.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” developed from a translation tradition rather than from the wording of Hesiod’s original story. The Greek term pithos refers to a jar or storage container, not a small hinged box. Erasmus’s Latin rendering helped establish the box wording in European languages, and that phrase became the standard expression.
This translation history explains a common point of confusion in the myth. Ancient images and scholarly discussions generally treat Pandora’s container as a large jar. The modern idiom now means a source of unexpected problems, even though the physical object in the earliest surviving account was a pithos.