In Hesiod’s Pandora myth, Pandora opens a jar, although later retellings call it a box.
The earliest surviving literary accounts appear in Hesiod’s Greek poems Works and Days and Theogony, composed in the eighth or seventh century BCE. Hesiod uses the Greek word pithos, a large storage jar, rather than a small hinged container. The jar holds evils that spread into the human world after Pandora removes its covering.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” became established much later through a translation choice. The sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus translated pithos into the Latin pyxis, meaning box or small container, helping create the wording used in modern languages. The traditional image is therefore based on a long-standing linguistic transformation, not Hesiod’s original object.
Greek storage jars were practical household vessels, so the jar also fits the domestic setting of the story. Modern retellings often preserve the moral warning while changing the container’s shape.