In Hesiod’s account of Pandora, which poem first tells the story of her creation?

Hesiod’s Works and Days is the earliest surviving literary work to tell the story of Pandora’s creation.

Hesiod, a Greek poet usually dated to the eighth or seventh century BCE, presents Pandora as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus stole fire. The account appears in the poem’s discussion of the origins of human suffering and the five ages of humanity.

Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, but that earlier poem gives less narrative detail about her. The fuller creation story—including the gods’ gifts, the sealed container, and Epimetheus—is in Works and Days.

Modern retellings often call the object a box, but Hesiod’s Greek word is pithos, usually translated as a large storage jar. The poem therefore matters both as the source of the myth and as evidence for the story’s original form.