In Hesiod’s Pandora myth, Pandora opened a jar that released the world’s troubles.
The earliest surviving Greek account appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days, composed in the seventh or eighth century BCE. Hesiod describes Pandora opening a large storage vessel, commonly translated from the Greek word pithos. A pithos was a substantial earthenware container used for storing commodities such as grain, oil, or wine.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” comes from a later translation tradition. In the sixteenth century, the humanist Erasmus translated pithos into the Latin pyxis, meaning a box or small container. That choice helped establish the modern expression, although “Pandora’s jar” is closer to Hesiod’s wording.
The vessel is not itself usually named as a box in the earliest Greek version. The crucial event is that opening it releases evils into human life, while one remaining thing stays inside.