In Hesiod’s Pandora myth, Pandora opens a jar, although later translations call it a box.
Hesiod uses the ancient Greek word pithos, which usually means a large storage jar. Such jars were used in the ancient Greek world for storing wine, grain, oil, and other supplies. The famous container therefore was not originally described as a small wooden box.
The “box” wording became standard much later through translation and retelling. The Latin writer Erasmus used the expression pyxis, meaning a box or small container, in a sixteenth-century discussion of the story. That choice strongly influenced the familiar English name “Pandora’s box.”
The distinction matters because the container is part of the myth’s symbolism: a household storage vessel becomes the place from which evils escape into the human world. The ancient version is specifically a jar, not merely any object that can hold something.