Hesiod’s Pandora story first appears in surviving Greek literature around the 8th century BCE.
The episode is found in Hesiod’s Works and Days, a Greek didactic poem usually dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Hesiod also tells a related version in the Theogony, but Works and Days provides the fuller account of the container and the troubles released from it.
The expression “Pandora’s box” is a later wording. Hesiod describes a large storage jar, called a pithos, rather than a small box. Renaissance translators and later retellings helped popularize the familiar phrase.
Dating ancient poetry is approximate, because no manuscript written by Hesiod himself survives. The eighth-century BCE date identifies the period in which the poem was composed, not a precise year. The myth therefore predates many famous classical Greek authors, including Herodotus and Sophocles.