In Hesiod’s Pandora story, evils escaped when she opened the container.
Hesiod’s Works and Days describes Pandora opening a large storage jar, from which diseases, suffering, and other troubles spread among humanity. The poem presents this release as the reason human life contains hardship that had previously been absent or hidden.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” comes from a later translation tradition. Hesiod’s original Greek uses pithos, a large jar or storage vessel, not the small box imagined in modern illustrations. The change in wording helped create the modern idiom.
The story is often simplified into a tale about one specific evil, but Hesiod describes a collection of evils. Hope is treated separately in the account: it remains inside the vessel when Pandora replaces the lid.