In Hesiod’s account, the container later called Pandora’s Box was a pithos.
A pithos was a large ancient Greek storage jar, commonly used for commodities such as grain, wine, or oil. Hesiod’s Works and Days describes Pandora opening a pithos, not a small hinged box. The familiar English expression “Pandora’s box” developed much later through translation and retelling.
The Greek word pithos is important because it changes the visual image of the myth. A pithos could be a substantial vessel used in domestic or agricultural storage, making the story’s container more like a large jar than a modern box. The story says that troubles escaped from it, while hope remained inside.
Different translations handle the object in different ways, and later artistic traditions often depict Pandora lifting a lid from a box. That image is culturally dominant today, but pithos is the more precise term for Hesiod’s original vessel in the surviving literary account.