Hesiod wrote Works and Days, the earliest surviving literary account of Pandora’s story.
Works and Days is an ancient Greek didactic poem that combines advice about farming and justice with myths explaining humanity’s difficult condition. Its Pandora episode follows the theft of fire by Prometheus and describes Zeus’s creation of a woman whose opening of a storage vessel releases troubles into the world.
Hesiod also presents a related version in the Theogony, where Pandora is mentioned in connection with the creation of women and the punishment of Prometheus. The two poems are important because they preserve the earliest known written form of the myth, though they differ in emphasis and detail.
Hesiod is often dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE and is traditionally placed alongside Homer among Greece’s earliest poets. Ovid was a Roman poet writing centuries later, while Sophocles was a dramatist; neither wrote the original Pandora account.