In Hesiod’s Pandora myth, Zeus gives Pandora a pithos, a large Greek storage jar. The word appears in the ancient literary tradition behind the later expression “Pandora’s box.” A pithos was normally used to store goods such as grain, wine, or oil, and some examples were large enough to stand partly buried in the ground.
The container’s identity matters because “box” is not the wording of Hesiod’s original account. The Greek term is pithos, and the story describes Pandora opening it and releasing evils into the world. The jar belongs to the material culture of ancient Greece rather than to the small hinged box imagined in many modern illustrations.
The familiar box wording became widespread through later translation history, especially after Erasmus used the Latin word pyxis. That translation helped reshape the myth in European languages. Modern retellings often preserve “Pandora’s box” while scholars still point out that the earliest source says jar.