Hesiod’s Works and Days contains the earliest surviving version of Pandora’s story.
The poem is a didactic work traditionally attributed to Hesiod, a Greek poet who probably lived around the seventh century BCE. It combines advice about farming and justice with myths explaining why human life includes suffering and labor. Pandora’s creation and the opening of her container appear in the poem’s account of the five ages of humanity.
Hesiod also tells a related version in the Theogony, but Works and Days gives the fuller narrative: Zeus orders the creation of a woman, the gods give her gifts, and she releases troubles into the world. The poem does not use the later standard expression “Pandora’s box”; its container is described with the Greek word pithos, meaning a large storage jar.
Works and Days is therefore important both for Pandora and for early Greek ideas about work, justice, and the human condition.