Hesiod tells the fullest surviving version of Pandora’s story in Works and Days.
The poem, usually dated to the seventh century BCE, presents Pandora as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus stole fire. Zeus orders the gods to create a beautiful woman whose gifts conceal a harmful purpose. Pandora later opens the storage jar, releasing troubles into the world.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in Theogony, but that earlier poem gives a shorter account and does not narrate the opening of the jar in the same detail. The two poems are the main early Greek literary sources for the myth.
The story is often called “Pandora’s box,” although Hesiod describes a large storage jar, or pithos. The box wording became common later through a Renaissance translation tradition.