In Hesiod’s Greek myth, Pandora opened a jar, not a box.
The earliest surviving accounts appear in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony, composed in ancient Greece. Hesiod uses the Greek word pithos, meaning a large storage jar or vessel. The object contained destructive forces and was opened by Pandora, releasing them into the human world.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” arose much later through a translation tradition. The Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus translated pithos into Latin as pyxis, a small box, in his 1508 collection Adagia. That wording became influential in European languages and eventually fixed the popular title.
The myth therefore has an important common mix-up: the original Greek story features a jar. The modern expression remains “Pandora’s box” because Erasmus’s translation became culturally dominant.