Hesiod’s Works and Days gives the fullest surviving account of Pandora’s creation and her jar.
The poem presents Pandora as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus stole fire and gave it to mortals. Zeus orders the gods to create a woman whose appearance is attractive but whose arrival brings suffering to humankind. Hesiod then describes the container that Pandora opens, releasing troubles into the world.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, but the two poems do not tell the story in identical detail. Works and Days is the main ancient source for the familiar narrative, while the Theogony focuses more briefly on the consequences of Prometheus’s deception and Zeus’s response.
A common modern mistake is to treat “Pandora’s Box” as Hesiod’s wording. Hesiod describes a large storage jar, not a box; the box image became standard through later Latin and European retellings.