In Hesiod’s Pandora myth, hope remained in the jar after all the evils escaped.
The detail appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days, an ancient Greek poem that gives the earliest surviving literary account of the story. Pandora opens the container, and the harmful forces inside fly out into the world. The text then says that only Elpis, commonly translated as “hope,” remains within.
The meaning of this ending has been debated since antiquity. Some readers view hope as a comfort left for humanity, while others note that Hesiod’s wording and the exact nature of Elpis are difficult to interpret. The story does not explicitly call the container a box: Hesiod describes a pithos, a large storage jar.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” developed later through translation and artistic tradition. In the original myth, the surviving occupant is therefore a personified concept, not a physical object or deity.