In Hesiod’s Greek myth of Pandora’s Box, the container was originally a jar, not a box.
Hesiod wrote about Pandora in the ancient Greek poems Theogony and Works and Days. The Greek word he used was pithos, which means a large storage jar. Such jars were commonly used in the ancient Mediterranean for holding food, wine, oil, or other supplies.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” arose much later through a translation tradition. The sixteenth-century humanist Desiderius Erasmus translated pithos into the Latin word pyxis, meaning a small box or container. English and other European retellings then popularized the box image.
This detail is a frequent source of confusion: the ancient Greek story describes a jar, while the modern idiom uses a box. The myth’s central event remains the same: after the container is opened, harmful things escape into the world, while one final element remains inside.