In Hesiod’s Pandora story, fire was the gift from Prometheus that angered Zeus and led to Pandora’s creation.
Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. Fire represented practical knowledge, technology, warmth, cooking, and the ability to work materials. Zeus regarded its transfer as a serious violation of the boundary between gods and humans.
Hesiod places Pandora’s creation within the punishment that followed. Zeus arranged for the gods to make Pandora, while Prometheus himself received a separate punishment in which he was bound and suffered repeated attacks on his liver. The two punishments belong to the same mythic conflict.
Later versions often emphasize Prometheus as a heroic champion of humanity. Hesiod’s early account is more hostile to him and presents the theft as an offense against Zeus’s order. The fire episode and Pandora episode are therefore linked through divine retribution, not because Pandora carried fire or directly met Prometheus.