In Hesiod’s Pandora myth, the Greek word for the jar that held the released evils is pithos.
A pithos was a large storage vessel used in ancient Greece, especially for keeping products such as grain, oil, and wine. It was generally much larger than an ordinary household jar and could be made for long-term storage. Hesiod’s Works and Days uses the word pithos when describing the container connected with Pandora.
The familiar expression “Pandora’s box” developed later because Renaissance translators and interpreters rendered the Greek storage vessel as a box or container. That translation changed the image in popular culture, but it does not match Hesiod’s original term.
A pithos was not the same as an amphora, which usually had two handles and a narrower shape. Nor was it a krater, a vessel used for mixing wine and water. This vocabulary distinction is central to understanding how the ancient story became the modern idiom.