Hesiod describes Pandora as a punishment for Prometheus’s theft of fire.
The story appears chiefly in two works attributed to Hesiod: Theogony and Works and Days. In this narrative, Prometheus tricks Zeus during a sacrifice and later steals fire for humanity. Zeus responds by arranging the creation of Pandora, who is sent to Epimetheus with a sealed container.
Works and Days gives the fuller account of Pandora’s arrival and the release of human afflictions. The poem uses the myth to explain why labor, disease, and other hardships exist, while also presenting Zeus’s authority as central to the order of the cosmos. The story is therefore more than a tale about curiosity; it is part of a larger myth about divine punishment and the human condition.
Homer is sometimes named as the source because he is the best-known early Greek poet, but the surviving Pandora narrative is associated with Hesiod. Pindar and Sophocles also wrote about mythic subjects, yet they are not the primary source for this account.